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October, 2009

Municipalities Nationwide Reduce Streetlighting to Cut Expense

The recession has brought hard times to municipalities across our nation and around the world. While analyzing their budgets, looking for places to trim expenses, municipal leaders in a number of communities have noticed that they have been paying out a large, steady flow of funds to pay the power and maintenance bills for the streetlights which their towns and cities operate. They may also realize that they are not certain whether all of those lights are serving purposes equal to the amount being spent to operate them; in some cases, they do not even know which earlier leaders installed various lights, or what precise purposes the management of earlier decades had in mind when installing them.
 
While some municipalities may be shutting off some lights now, with the intention of turning them back on "when things improve" (as they are taking other temporary measures, such as laying off employees, hoping to re-hire them before long), others are realizing that unnecessary or inefficient lighting is something wasteful which should be cut from their budgets permanently. The wisest of these towns and cities are starting from scratch, and defining under what circumstances they should be illuminating the night, to what levels, and during what hours.
 

Such analysis can bring the whole municipal "team" onboard: besides the engineers and accountants, police, fire, and other community safety officers, as well as environmental groups can work together on defining standards for streetlight installations. The municipalities then use those standards to analyze their existing lighting installations, and altering the operation of or even removing streetlights which do not meet their own standards of necessity.

 
We applaud the concept of analyzing streetlighting practice "from scratch". Every well managed municipality should have standards to define when and where supplemental illumination is needed for safety, security, and/or convenience. Most municipalities also operate streetlighting which was installed over various eras, by managers or developers who may well not have had modern considerations of energy efficiency or environmental and fiscal responsibility in mind. New, economical technologies are also available to control the operation of streetlights, allowing some to be turned off or dimmed during the hours when few citizens are out in certain areas; a light which is on only half of the night consumes 50% less energy than one left on all night (and has half the utility bill). Beyond energy efficiency, this analysis and standard setting should incorporate all of the environmental, health and safety concerns which we address on this website.
 
In the table below are some U.S. towns and cities which have either adopted or are currently analyzing lighting-reduction programs. Included is some summary information on each, with links to Web sources for more details. We will periodically update this information; feel free to send us reports of other municipalities which you know of to be looking into this option.
 

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