Germany's Green Idea: Street Lighting on Demand | Hacker News Reader

Germany's Green Idea: Street Lighting on Demand

time.com

39 pointsaswanson16 comments

Oh wow.

It's so nice to see news from years ago making it back as 'new' headlines. Whatever.

Feedback for such schemes has been the following-

a: that people felt incredibly unsafe (especially women) and stopped going out out night, regardless of being able to turn the lights on.

b: non locals, travelers, elderly people, disabled and so on can't use it easily. period.

c: most street lights are high power sodium lights, which are (According to wikipedia and other sources) one of, if not the most, efficient form of distributing energy in the form of light. They also happen to have a fairly significant startup time, so motion sensors wouldn't be very efficient. It's not obvious that replacing with more efficient startup lamps and motion sensors would help.

d: would you want to drive where your eyes would constantly have to re-dilate as the lights come on?

e: i've seen some pilot programs that have photovoltaic collection plates on top of street light stands, which collect energy during the day to activate the light at night. Feels more like the future we've been looking for.

I'd much rather see policies which force office lights, computers and so on be turned off at night (or face fines, etc) than street lights that work less efficiently.

The thing is it is a small village there are some things to think about:

elderly are not going to be walking about at night (there is probably much much less crime concerning any women)

there won't be very many non locals except for visiting family

the lights were costing enough that there were blackouts in the morning

there wont be very many people driving at night

the solar would be a good idea if it was cheap

It isn't the greatest idea but if it has worked out well for a small village good for them and their problem solving ability

Many parking meters in Belgium have photovoltaic collection plates. It's being done.

This reminds me of a similar setup that I learned about during pilot training: a lot of small untowered airports use a pilot-controlled runway lighting setup that is controlled by pilots clicking their radios on a certain frequency to turn on the runway lighting at night, adjust brightness, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_Controlled_Lighting

Wow. Talk about over-engineering.

Seems like a button would have done the trick.

Put them at the ends of streets (or one on each lamppost, if you can afford it) and have it turn on the lights for the street/block.

No man, motion sensors.

That would just be more expensive and less reliable. buttons would do the trick, except for the case you want to have lights on in the moment you are leaving your house.

It gives the kids a good excuse for wanting a cell phone :)

Installing the buttons incurs a capital cost, and then there's the cost of maintenance, and the risk that vandals will pound on the buttons just for the hell of it.

By contrast, the Dial4Light system builds on infrastructure for both control and authentication that already exists.

It's an interesting idea, but the town has only 9,000 people. I wonder how this operation would work in a larger setting, or perhaps more importantly, how it is safeguarded from abuse.

Also curious if there is an app for that...

Edit: on second thought, abuse might really be a non-issue, since the limit for abuse isn't worse than what they had to deal with originally and text message can be tracked with some ease.

Great idea but all I can think of is the room for abuse for criminals. Easy to break into cars in pitch black.

Nice. Ideally, with more cell phones getting GPS, eventually it'd be possible to set up one's cell phone to communicate one's position to the central lighting facility, and have it turn on the lights as I approach them, and off the lights after I've passed them by.

Why not use motion sensors? I'm sure I've walked somewhere with them used for streetlights.

Has someone thought about carrying an electric torch? Or display a white image on your cellphone display to get light.

That sounds like a Viz top tip - "HACKERS: save money on torches by waving your expensive, brightly-lit mobile around in front of you while walking down the road in the dead of night."

What happens when I visit a city using this system?

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