In this article, the author outlines his argument that urban lighting has been served badly by the priority given to traffic lighting and the lack of wider public lighting policy. Today, public lighting has a low priority in policy and investment terms, while the road and street lighting infrastructure rots with little hope of financial rescue. Governments ignore the huge contribution that lighting can make to crime prevention, while preferring to pay for ineffective closed circuit television cameras. The few strategic urban lighting plans commissioned by farsighted local authorities are shelved for lack of funds to implement them. Although easy to blame governments, local authority lighting departments, lighting engineers, and manufacturers must take some responsibility, because most urban lighting in the UK is uninspiring and not aesthetically pleasing. As a result, people tend to undervalue lighting. Street lighting is still designed almost entirely for drivers, so that it has four deadly features: (1) flat and bland lighting on roads; (2) failure to illuminate vertical surfaces properly; (3) harshness and excessive glare; and (4) the poor colour appearance of cheap but efficient sodium lamps.
Abstract