Over the past year or so, I have noticed that one of the unitary authorities in the North west, has introduced a policy of completely switching off whole sections of A and B road street lighting, usually 10m SONs. Small, yellow signs are fixed at intervals advising the motorist or pedestrian "street lighting not in use". I assume the redundant equipment will be removed in due course.  Naturally this will have a lot to do with saving money, carbon emissions, polar bears or whatever, plus the fact that many of these routes are generally rural in nature. Lighting that is remaining, particularly in neighbouring towns and villages will be either fluorescent or LED and all run via a CMS.  

Have members come across this sort of thing in their local areas? I know that part-night lighting is now fashionable although interestingly, shutting lamps off at midnight is not a new thing. Those of a certain age will recall when the only streetlamps still on after midnight were on main road junctions only.

Whilst I think this change will bring benefits, including a reversal of the trend for blasting everything (including cows) with light, I would still prefer to see rural highways lit by a few beta 5s, as was once common here up to the 1980s. What do you think?

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"I can't think what you want to go to London for, you won't find any better lampposts there..."
L.S. Lowry. 1887-1976.

A few places have looked to switch off or remove lighting on certain roads, such as A-roads through open countryside. A few northern councils have done it, but so have some southern councils. I think the skew towards northern councils doing more rural A-road switch offs is because they have more rural A-roads lit up as if they are urban than down south. I certainly get that feeling when driving through counties like Staffordshire and Cheshire.

The extent to which lighting is installed on the network progressively increased up until the economic crisis, as did the power consumption of both individual lanterns and schemes as a whole, with more columns being added and lanterns getting brighter. This binge on energy has burnt the fingers of a lot of councils, who are now having to do things like implement permanent switch offs and part night lighting, reduce lantern power consumption through lower wattage lamps and dimming, and generally be more sensible. The economic crisis really did stop street lighting in the UK from becoming a monster, although for some places it came too late and those places are now paying the price for their wasteful ways.

The introduction of LED and the improved economic situation will change things, but ultimately if a road doesn't need to be lit then it doesn't need to be lit.

In Cardiff in the early 1990s, the City Council wanted to save money by turning lighting off on the A48 Eastern Avenue. This is a major dual carriageway into the city from the M4 at J29. The idea was to save money. At that time it was lit with 135W SOX.

Despite a major uproar, it was turned off and the lighting left intact. It was thought it would later be removed. In the end it was turned back on and the 135W SOX later replaced by ZX3s which still survive today.

East Sussex CC announced a couple of years back (the link is on here somewhere) that lighting would be turned off on distributor roads on the the outskirts of many towns, again to save money. It was unclear if it would later be removed.

However, as already mentioned, the spread of part night switching and LEDs/dimming seems to be reducing the amount of installations being switched off.

In west Wiltshire, signs were put up when part night switching was first implemented a few years back on certain A roads.

In my own village we were given the option of having the lighting removed or part nighted. In the end the Parish Council went for part night.

However much of the lighting stock is elderly and given none of the surrounding villages have lighting, I wonder if in the future the lighting could be removed.

In Derbyshire, notices like this are attached to columns (image courtesy of MJB).

The village of Hayfield is littered with these purple stickers, considering that its a rural area the eastern part sees a lot of part nighters where as on the main A624 is lit pretty much all the time (well it was when I passed through on a pushbike a few years back.)

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From streetlighting to radio, dance through the night whilst the streetlights are glowing outside.

It seems in the most part that councils that never really bothered with bulk upgrades in huge numbers have come out rather well now... those who had the odd replacement schemes, but were mainly only replacing lanterns and columns that were no longer serviceable.

York is one such example - and even though the lighting has come back in-house after being contracted out to Amey, it's still the same team overall and the boss there has often been able to influence the council as that what makes best economic sense to install.... which is why we had roughly 2,000 mercury lanterns (at an average of 100W per lantern, give or take for the odd one with a 125w lamp in) replaced by fluorescent lanterns running at less than half the consumption; and even now with the city climbing onto the LED wagon, we're getting 24W lanterns replacing ones that had been running 35W SOX lamps (not including losses in the control gear) and the odd 70W SON lantern if it's on the same street and where not replacing it would look odd - these new lanterns don't switch off and don't use special photocells or CMS systems, but instead have a solar calendar circuit inside the ballast which calculates when midnight is and dims the LEDs to 60% until 6am.

The only lights we have out at night are ones which are broken!

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