[gary]

Thanks for the link to the story.

A few years back, whilst on an overnight flight from New York to San Francisco,
as I looked out the window whilst crossing the continent, the thought occurred to me
that it was amazing that Bill Gates was the richest man in the United States and not
whoever sold them all those orange street lights.

America is ablaze with street lights from coast to coast and much of that energy
is just uselessly radiating upward into space.

Meantime in Australia, astronomers at the recently renamed Australian
Astronomical Observatory (AAO) at Coonabarabran have been saying for some
years that the light pollution from Sydney, some 350km away, is already
having an impact on them.

Yet in my own street in the northern suburbs of Sydney, a quiet cul-de-sac,
I really would have to question why every street light has to be on during each night
of the week. Individual lights in many quiet streets could be assessed on a street
pole by street pole basis and a decision might then be made to fit them with
an intelligent controller that switches them off at certain off-peak times, say for
example, from 2am to 4am Monday to Thursday. For example, it might be decided that,
in some streets, 50% of street lights could be switched off at certain times.

Perhaps the same hypothetical intelligent controllers could also have an
integrated wireless remote. Council issues each household with a couple of
key fob remotes. Additional remotes could be made available for purchase for
some reasonable low fee. You decide you want to go for a walk at 3:30am on
a Monday night or are coming home from night shift, simply press your remote
and the 50% of lights that had switched off come on for several blocks and stay
on for some nominal time, say 15 minutes. If they go off and you want them back
on, simply press the key fob in your pocket again.

In any case, cars have their own headlights and for pedestrians that prefer
additional light if out between 2am and 4am, small bright LED flashlights that fit
in a pocket or bag are readily available and are probably less burdensome to carry
than say, an umbrella on a rainy night.

In many instances, some might question whether some street lights have become
the adult equivalent of children's bedside night lights, in that they don't seem to do
much to enhance safety or security - and in some cases arguably hinder it - but have
really just become a psychological comfort. With the rising cost of power and
dwindling energy resources, it is very much the time to start weaning us off them.
In some quiet streets, the 100% of people that were asleep probably wouldn't
even realize if half of the lights went off in their street for a couple of hours on
Mon to Thurs.