Outdoor Lighting and Crime - Amper

mandatory. Absolutely no exceptions should be allowed, apart from guidance or anticollision
beacons for marine or aerial navigation, airfield lighting and traffic lights. But even in these
cases, care needs to be exercised to prevent or limit light trespass and upward waste light
wherever this can be done without affecting operational performance and safety. Long cowls
and highly directional output can help to achieve good results.
Illuminated advertising signs should be treated in a comparable fashion. Lighting for new
signs should only be approved where some existing sign on the property is made dimmer or
removed to compensate or overcompensate. Stringent limits are required on the consequent
disruption to street lighting design uniformity, and there may also be a justifiable need to have
a reasonable colour match between the net outputs of the sign and the street lighting.
Compliance will doubtless be onerous for many, but crime as an alternative is worse.
Existing illuminated signs should likewise be reduced in luminance and maximum flux or
turned off permanently to restore street lighting uniformity. In general, signs will need to be
limited to, at most, a small fraction of typical present values of energy consumption, total
light output and glare. The values in Table 12 could be adopted as an interim measure, with
greater reductions in the longer term. Extensive and uniform application of new controls
would be required to try to maintain a ‘level playing field’ in the commercial sense. ‘Sunset’
delays in compliance may be sought by sign owners, but such requests should be considered
as wanting to continue imposing avoidable crime on the community.
For enhanced traffic safety, an additional requirement for all outdoor signs and billboards
should be that their maximum luminance at night is not to exceed that of any road sign,
regardless of whether either or both are lit or not, when both are visible within 60 degrees of
any driver’s straight-ahead line of sight from any lane of any road.
Local and regional audits will be necessary to ensure that there is a reduction, preferably to
the Kyoto agreed level or below where applicable, in the energy usage for all outdoor lighting
relative to the Kyoto base year, 1990. There should also be a reduction in total light output
and in total waste light from one year to the next for long-term crime reduction. The present
profligate use and waste of light and energy has to be reined in drastically. Regions that
ignore this and expect others to make up for their tardiness or selfishness might need to be
penalised by the state, eg in the form of funding reductions.
Decorative lighting and light waste from undraped windows of buildings are also a part of the
problem and will need to be monitored closely to ensure reductions. Lapses will need to be
dealt with in ways that motivate future compliance. Lighting priorities need to be established.
Street lighting would have a high priority, especially if it can be confirmed as an effective
traffic accident countermeasure, along with public and domestic lighting for pedestrian and
wheelchair wayfinding and mobility safety. Commercial outdoor lighting could be next,
followed by sports lighting (with the exception of golf driving range lighting, which is
notoriously troublesome and needs to be banned outright), illuminated advertising and then
decorative lighting. Lowest priority of all should be upwardly aimed floodlights, commercial
and decorative skybeams and laser display beams, if they are not already subject to outright
ban. Having them last or second last on the list should be equivalent to a total ban in any
case.
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