Day Light

A street lamp ablaze at 3pm
This is a street light in Embankment Gardens, at 3.45pm on Saturday. It is fully switched on and drawing electricity, despite the clear blue skies and impeccable visibility that one might associate with a mid-summer mid-afternoon.
There must be a cheap piece of technology that solves this inefficiency. The logo on the public bins says City of Westminster Council, so I assume they’re responsible. I wonder who I should write to?
Some people may argue that excess streetlighting is barely an issue when London has so many other problems, such as gun crime and poverty. To be clear, I’m not whining from a climate change point-of-view, so much as the general administration of the thing. How can we have confidence in local authorities to tackle the more complex social problems, if they cannot tell the difference between day and night?

11 Replies to “Day Light”

  1. Strange – out here in provincial Bristol all the streetlights have sunlight detectors which switch them on when it gets dark and off when it gets light. they’ve been around since the last eclipse (1999) at least, because they all came on for it.
    London councils probably have far more worthy, socialist things to spend your money on – “diversity outreach co-ordinators” and the like…..

  2. Yeah, and the waste of our money.
    The logo on the public bins says City of Westminster Council, so I assume they’re responsible. I wonder who I should write to?
    Umm, could try Westminster Council?

  3. In Bristol even the traffic light phasing is socialist (5 seconds on green for cars, 5 minutes for pedestrians and cyclists)… You make a good point though, if councils can’t even get the basics right then you do wonder if they have a hope in hell of managing the more serious problems.

  4. See if there is any dept. at Westminster Council listed as “Road Services”. Those are the folks we had to get permission from to put the [murmur] signs on poles like those. At the very least they’d know who to pass you on to.

  5. And maybe its the same tree that drops the wrong kind of leaves on the railway lines.
    No doubt Matt will accuse me of political correctness here, but I really don’t think we should blame the tree.

  6. I agree Rob, the tree is the real victim in all of this. Trees suffer from low self esteem caused by negative sterotyping and structural inequalities…..
    One of the slightly wakier eco fascist ideas is that street lights should all switched off after midnight, as they are in some parts of Europe.

  7. If streelights were totally solar powered like trees, I wouldn’t have a problem with them being on all day and all night. Nor would those campaigners you mention, I assume.

  8. Street lights could be activated by movement sensors such as I have fora spotlight in my front garden. The lights would go on when cars or pedestrians were about but would switch off with no activity.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.