Jonathan Peterson ‘23
Co-Executive Editor
My good friend, Dana Lake, styles the decision to not add harsh, unnatural, and intrusive lighting to the roadsides of Virginia’s highways as one designed to ensure that she ends up in a head-on collision. Or hit a deer. Or simply drive off the road. This view is shortsighted and selfish, as I will detail while showing readers that the decision to keep Virginia’s roads as dark as death is ineffably the correct choice.
I can sum up my argument in favor of dark roads with one word: conservation. The decision to add lights to roadsides requires resources and space, and it produces unquantifiable costs to conservation of both wildlife and dark skies.
The average street light costs between approximately $5,000 and $8,000, with those numbers increasing by about 20 percent for projects on a highway or bridge.[1] These lights cost another $43.80 for every year they are installed in electricity fees.[2] In short, adding more streetlights would require either relocating funds or raising taxes. Relocating funds will result in opportunity costs which may not be justified. Further, with headlights already being an invention we all use on roads anyway, the addition of streetlights may not actually increase safety all that much.[3]
Further, adding these lights will harm conservation beyond just conserving our wallets. Adding streetlights will require developing the sides of roadways. The act of developing these areas, outside of the clear loss of a habitat, however inconsequential that habitat might be, also comes with its own carbon footprint. Not only that, it impacts efforts at preserving dark skies, which are proven to be critical for “the proper functioning of natural ecosystems.”[4] These benefits also inure to humans as well, who can appreciate, and thus benefit from, properly conserved night skies.
So, yeah, I don’t want Dana to die in a car crash on some dark and windy Virginian road. But I also don’t think that more artificial lighting is the right solution. It’s called headlights and attentive driving.
Dana Lake ‘23
Editor-in-Chief
What Jon fails to consider in his well-researched article[5] is that headlights and attentive driving mean nothing to the grim determination the wildlife in this commonwealth have in their march toward oblivion via front-end collision. Jon and other extremist environmentalists may value things like “stars” and “nature” over human beings, but most people do not have such a radical disregard for my personal safety.
First, I learned how to drive in Florida, where the only things you have to dodge are other drivers.[6]The highways are straight lines, with overhead lights nicely spaced every twenty feet or so. They are so nicely illuminated and so straight that you can see incoming problems from a hundred miles down the road. Attentive driving shouldn’t mean I am white-knuckle gripping the steering wheel in both hands, leaning forward, and chanting prayers to God under my breath for sixty miles at a time.
Virginia is not a commonwealth built on an intuitive, well-thought-out grid. It is windy and curvy and full of hills that my 2016 Hyundai Accent has a hard time climbing. The Florida Department of Transportation recommends[7] roadway lighting especially on such roads; VDOT has recklessly left good, honest drivers to the whims of a dark abyss.
Second, how can headlights save me from getting vehicular homicided when more and more cars have LED bulbs instead of halogen. When I imagine the bright light people walk toward when they are moving on to the other side, it is the eerie blue of a high-intensity discharge headlight guiding them.
Don’t even get me started on driving in the rain around here, or the horrific bridge I have to walk under outside of Ivy if I want to get a Slurpee at 7-Eleven. Give us some lights, and give me a chance of getting out of this commonwealth with both my car’s bumpers intact.
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jtp4bw@virginia.edu
dl9uh@virginia.edu
[1] Wenli, How Much Does a Street Light Cost to Run, KangLight, (July 5, 2021) https://kanglight.com/how-much-does-a-street-light-cost-to-run/.
[2] Id. This number goes down for solar street lights.
[3] This isn’t to say that added lights don’t help drivers to observe hazards. However, I am struggling to find any evidence which conclusively links poor visibility due to darkness to increased rates of car crashes. Certainly time of day has an impact; however, there are many potential confounding variables when considering time of day as a proxy for whether good lighting impacts driving safety.
[4] Managing Artificial Light to Protect Natural Systems and to Appreciate the Night Sky, Dark Skies Advisory Group,http://darkskyparks.org/dark-skies-and-nature-conservation/#:~:text=A%20night%20sky%20without%20artificial,the%20consequences%20of%20light%20pollution (last visited Jan. 29, 2023).
[5] A classic case of adding statistics to meet the word count requirement, no doubt.
[6] And the occasional iguana.
[7] Stopping Sight Distance on Turning Roads, Manual of Uniform Standards, FDOT (May 2005).