Street and motorway lights should be dimmed or switched off to save energy and let people see the stars, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution says.
It says there is little evidence that such lighting significantly cuts accidents or crime. It recommends the removal of thousands of motorway lights, possibly even at junctions. The report says that since 1993 most of the UK has become brighter, obscuring the stars, and it backs a recent paper in the scientific journal Nature that said: “Without a direct view of the stars, mankind is cut off from most of the Universe, deprived of any direct sense of its huge scale and our tiny place in it.”
The commission proposes “dark- sky parks” all over Britain, with planning restrictions on outdoor lighting. The Galloway Forest Park in southern Scotland this month became Britain’s first official dark-sky park, with 7,000 stars visible there, compared with 500 in Glasgow.
It says that the planned replacement of 2.3 million of Britain’s 7.4 million road lights in the next two years is “a real opportunity for local authorities to think about minimising the negative impacts of stray light”.
It says motorway lighting reduces crashes by about 10 per cent and that this may be too low to justify the costs. It welcomes the Highways Agency’s trials of switching off lighting on six stretches of motorway between midnight and 5am. The trials began in March and have so far reduced carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation by 230 tonnes, equal to 100 cars’ annual emissions
