Outdoor Lighting and Crime - Amper

vote-losing) disincentives such as special taxes. For example, the incentive to develop highrise
city office and apartment buildings may disappear if strict upper limits are applied to the
amount of light they are permitted to radiate at night. It could be advantageous for lighting
restrictions to be more stringent in specific areas. This scenario is unlike anything that has
been tried before (city blackouts in World War 2 were much darker and had other
constraints), so the practical difficulties and likelihood of success are unknown at present.
Relatively simple schemes may degenerate into overly simplistic approaches if implemented
without additional insights about local factors. Conversely, local factors may give insights
into new ways of managing development. For example, for decades at Tucson, AZ there has
been an ongoing development sprawl out into the desert, benefiting land speculators, builders
and homebuyers in different ways. Environmental objections are gradually overcoming the
complex political and commercial factors that have favoured development (Davis 1999). It
may now prove possible to justify manipulation of the existing limit on lumens per acre
across the city and county, and elsewhere, to allow a measure of controlled growth in
appropriate areas and to inhibit growth in others.
So, what do we do now? Continue with our conventional urban intensification and pretend
that there is no need for change? Learn to live with increasing crime and never quite enough
additional police to contain it? Devise modern equivalents of unlit nineteenth century rural
villages linked by freeways? Invent new kinds of city with crime designed out somehow
while keeping the outdoor bright lights? Whatever path is taken, it needs to be flexible
enough to adapt to new revelations of what works and what doesn’t. In the meantime, there is
a pressing need to get on with learning more about the practical application of lighting
minimisation as a crime reduction technique, and possibly as a development control.
As part of the possibility for governments to control urbanisation by the figurative flick of a
light switch, dark area ordinances may prove sufficient by themselves to stop development
under airport approach and departure paths, or to stop alienation of parkland, green wedges
and the like. But who knows? The idea could backfire if a Dark Suburb adaptation of the
Dark Campus idea caught on as the benefits and hazards became better understood. It is not
even untried, as some coastal towns in Florida already have no street lighting and stringent
restrictions on other outside lighting as a means of avoiding interference with natural breeding
of endangered species of turtle (eg IDA IS116 1997). The real estate market in these places
has certainly not collapsed.
Doubtless, there will be objections to the introduction of lighting controls anywhere, but it
would be difficult to sustain these in the face of the evidence that overturning or relaxing any
such controls appears likely to result in more crime. The case for lighting controls would be
helped by more quantitative data on the expected crime reduction benefits. It would be useful
to know if the crime rate could be reduced to something like its value of say 50 years ago by
cutting outdoor ambient artificial light to values like those in the 1950s. Whether the social
factors that set the potential crime rate would allow such large reductions, and with what time
constants, are new challenges for researchers.
8.3.3 The contribution from vehicle lighting
Isobe and Hamamura (1998) discovered indications that light energy loss from vehicle
headlighting was detectable in their data. The notional estimate of this quantity used in
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