FreeLists / az-observing / [AZ-Observing] Re: Lights off in downtown for Earth Hour ?? Reports from Fountain Hills and GRCO in Gilbert

["William R Wood" <w.wood@xxxxxxx>]

Back in NJ, during some electricity crisis about 20 years ago, our governer 
ordered all street lights statewide turned off for several days, maybe a 
week.  Nothing whatsoever bad happened except we taxpayers saved money and 
everybody saw more stars.  Street lights are hardly essential - total waste 
of money in my opinion since the glare reduces, not increases visibility. 
Even if streetlights are shielded so that no light goes up or sideways, the 
pools of light that hit the ground still reflect up and pollute the night 
sky.  Just fly over any city at night and look down - the light reflecting 
up off the streets is massive.  I have generally lived in areas with no 
street lights and no one had visibility problems.  I now live in Fountain 
Hills and there are no street lights in the residential zones - still no 
problems.  We drive to Houston to visit our kids - no streetlights during 
95% of the trip.  Only visibility problems are in/near cities due to the 
blinding glare from street lights.  I bet that if every other streetlight in 
any metro area was turned off without fanfare, hardly anybody would notice 
but we would have 50% less glare and pollution and expense.  Then we could 
turn off more, leaving maybe one streetlight on for every 3, then every 4 
and so on until most are gone.  Very few critical high traffic areas, if 
any, actually require the total blanket of light that we now have in most 
cities/towns.

So I would not classify street lights as essential and there is precedent to 
turn them off.  Maybe that will start to happen as a result of Earth Hour.

Regards

Bill Wood
Fountain Hills, AZ


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jennifer Polakis" <m24@xxxxxxx>
To: <az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, March 31, 2008 12:24 PM
Subject: [AZ-Observing] Re: Lights off in downtown for Earth Hour ?? Reports 
from Fountain Hills and GRCO in Gilbert


Since the World Wildlife Fund Australia's  main idea of this Hour was to
save on energy use and CO2 emissions, only non-essential lights were turned
off.  The promoters of dark skies seized the opportunity to illustrate you
can do the same everyday by not throwing your kwhs into the night sky.  I
doubt any city would intentionally turn off its street lights for an hour
but they could shield them and point them down forever. If there hadn't been
the glitch with getting Heritage Park to turn off the lights, I'm quite
positive the folks observing from the science center would have seen a real
difference.  I understand that even Mayor Gordon couldn't get hold of the
Heritage Park people to remind them.  But hopefully we'll get another try at
it next year and also hopefully the businesses that did participate realized
a savings and will now always turn their non-essential lights off.

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