Shedding light

I've just had an interesting meeting with Council officers to kick off a discussion about whether street lights should be turned off during the wee hours.

The idea of all-night lights is only a relatively new one, dating back a couple of decades when the technology made it possible to have them geared to light levels through automatic sensors. Previously someone just flipped a switch on and off, with them usually being turned off at midnight and back on at 6am.

The motivation for looking at this is around carbon reduction as the city has 34,000 street lights burning all through the night, even if there is no-one around to see them! Street lights contribute around 20% of the Council's carbon footprint and reducing the hours of use would save quite a bit. I am told that no major city does this yet, so we would be the first.

Ironically, there is little cost saving involved as night-time electricity is practically free for the Council - another example of the perversity of the energy business when looked at in environmental terms. There might be a little saving through longer lifetimes of the bulbs, but this would be marginal in the big scheme of things.

I'm quite keen to see this happen, but I think that some people might have concerns about the implications so the Council officers are working up an 'options paper' to look at whether and where we might trial this. There is already a trial for dimmed street lights going ahead in Totterdown and this might offer another approach. I think I'll be suggesting that Cotham might be a possible lights-off trial area, but I would welcome other thoughts.