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Old Posted May 20, 2019, 3:08 PM
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uaarkson uaarkson is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Back in Flint
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Encolpius View Post
Turning off street lights does not lead to more crime or accidents – study

https://www.theguardian.com/society/...ccidents-study

^ That's a study based on 14 years of data from 62 local authorities across England and Wales. Similar studies happened almost a decade earlier in Germany and reached the same conclusion. What research does show is that brighter streetlighting (esp. when the light is bluer LEDs) can harm animals at many levels of the food chain, reducing biodiversity. And it impacts human sleep, which causes all kinds of health problems for us and probably makes us more violent and antisocial. The result is that many German cities have been reducing, not increasing, the number and brightness of their streetlights. It makes them far nicer to walk around at night. US cities are many times brighter than their German counterparts.

What many cities trade, then, for the perception of safety is actual human health and biodiversity. What if we tried to make the nighttime environment more pleasant for everybody rather than less friendly to criminals? Maybe that would encourage more people to walk outside at night, which would actually make the streets safer?
I would like to see this study replicated in the United States where there are actually violent criminals with guns walking around at night, in countless neighborhoods.
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