Because dark streets mean more muggings, more burglaries, and more car accidents.
Cities are slowly adding “blinders” to streetlights, and homes are switching to motion activated lights — but this will take time because most of it is only replaced when the previous fixture fails.
the connection between bright light and lack of crime has been pretty thoroughly debunked, criminals like to see what they’re doing just as much as anyone else – Paul Bogard, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Night_(book) (2013)
I live in one of the safest part of the planet and people lost their shit when my town turned off every other street light. Not even on the main street, just the side street. They always talk about how unsafe it is and their children will die on the streets with no light. I walk my dog a lot at night and i have yet to see someone out on the streets, especially children who apparently roam around in the middle of the night.
My US city put one in in downtown. It would be fine should they have their own lane that bypassed traffic, but no thoughts were given to it’s actual implementation. They picked a loop path that goes from two lanes to one frequently. They simply placed the track on the road and kept car street parking on the other side. So you get the pleasure of waiting in traffic on the tram and the tram getting stuck because someone poorly parked their monster truck. Top that off with it was open 10am til 6pm when it first started, but downtown doesn’t have much going on during the day. They’ve changed times now but it barely scratches the surface of use issues. As someone fully for public transportation, this has been so poorly done it’s very frustrating. I do hope they have more fixes in the future.
The one thing it seems to be lacking, unless I’m missing it, is a “cost” variable. Since what we’d like to see and what we can afford to build are often very different, it would be nice to have a cost variable to play with!
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