The night light from streetlights dazzles us to the point of creating an illusion of safety. “It’s a superstitious belief,” says the researcher.
The idea that better lit streets make citizens safer is nothing less than “a superstitious belief”, says the British researcher Paul Marchant in an interview this Saturday.
With two decades of experience in studying the impact of artificial light on urban safety, Marchant warns that there is no concrete scientific evidence that proves that increasing the intensity of public lighting reduces crime, or even road accidents.
However, many local authorities are hesitant to reduce lights at night, not for financial or environmental reasons, but for fear of a negative reaction from residents.
“The call for more security is often part of the right-wing agenda, through the assertion that the population is under threat. However, what tends to happen is that people’s freedoms are systematically removed so that a radical right-wing government can remain in power. And yet, as can be seen in a crime graph published in 2022, which I co-authored, crime in the English city of Leeds has been decreasing, as is this is the case in many parts of the world”, he explains.
Marchant also criticizes “lighting marketing”, exploited by the lighting industry, which benefits from the continuous increase in luminosity, making people dependent on intense light to feel safe. Marchant recalls experiences in the United Kingdom in which the lighting industry lobby took advantage of the law against crime and disorder to pressure local authorities to increase street lighting, using low-quality studies financed by companies in the sector.
And “it is also necessary to take into account the “costs” of public lighting — not just the financial ones, but all the negative effects that artificial nighttime light has on the biosphere”, warns the researcher, in relation to light pollution caused by various species.
