February 2025: Pie Tins!

This month's guests:

• Mark Baker, founder of the Soft Lights Foundation.
• Nick Mesler, civil engineer specializing in traffic and pedestrian safety.
• Isa Mohammed, President of the Caribbean Institute of Astronomy.

Bill's News Picks:

• This Famous designer changed the way cities think about public lighting, Diana Budds, Fast Company. 
• Electric Utilities Sued Over Lighting and Wildlife Issues, Inside Lighting.  
• Artificial Light Increases Nighttime Prevalence of Predatory Fishes, Altering Community Composition on Coral Reefs, Global Change Biology. 
• We’re losing sight of the night sky. This First Nation is trying to protect it, Michelle Cyca, The Narwhal. 

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Chapters

• 8:21 Improving Street Lighting With LED Technology
• 17:11 Challenges and Solutions for Street Lighting
• 25:30 Optimizing Street Lighting for Efficiency
• 31:59 Impact of Street Lighting Regulations
• 43:08 Unified Sky Brightness Measurement Solutions

Transcript

Bill McGeeney: 0:06

night pollution news, february 2025, pie tins. Today is a very special episode. We talk all things you've ever wondered about street lights and how do you feel about having a new, scalable way to measure the night's brightness this month? Month from Soft Light Foundation, mark Baker, civil engineer, nick Messler and the president of the Caribbean Institute of Astronomy, issa Muhammad. Here we go Another Light Pollution News. Mark Baker, civil engineer and traffic safety specialist, mr Nick Messler, and the astronomy outreach extraordinaire bringing the stars to the Caribbean. The president of the Caribbean Institute of Astronomy, mr Issa Mohamed.

Bill McGeeney: 1:13

Before we begin today, you can find all of today's links, notes, transcripts over at our website, lightpollutionnewscom. If you're joining us for the first time, welcome. Be sure to hit the subscribe button on whatever podcast player you're listening from, and if you're enjoying what you're hearing, if it's providing you with value, why not consider being a supporter of the show? Supporters are offered the chance to sit in on live recordings, which features an open conversation after the show. Supporters also receive a special upgraded version of the monthly mailer that contains all of the news pool, including many articles that aren't included in the show recording. If you are already a supporter, thank you. Your support is greatly appreciated and very much helps us cover our costs. Today, I actually have Steve Maraconda sitting in and enjoying the show, so that's why I asked Mark and Issa to go on about what you guys are doing. And, nick, we haven't got to you yet, so I know you are involved in a ton. So what's going on, man? What is happening in your world?

Nick Mesler: 2:09

Yeah, it's been quite a sea change in how the work that we do and I should clarify we work very heavily, very large scale street lighting projects. Historically our company had been involved in just you know, really asset management, more so in the terms of street lighting conversions, if you're looking to upgrade your street lighting system, largely in the context of LEDs. It's been a question among cities. Well, I know I have street lights, but where are they? What kind of street light? What technology is installed? Is it working? Is it about to fall over? Do I want to roll a truck out there and come to find out the streetlights about to fall over and waste time and money doing so? We've helped answer that question. So we actually did. The city of Philadelphia a couple of years ago helped inventory all 130,000 streetlights within the city of Philadelphia. So we had a team of about 20, 30 people walking around the city. A total distance we approximated about it would be like walking from Philadelphia to Denver, colorado.

Bill McGeeney: 3:10

There's steps on that we covered, no, surely? Yeah, it was a great project.

Nick Mesler: 3:14

For that one in particular, we were only focused on the inventory side of things. The reason being is that if we're going to convert all the streetlights, we're just 1% of that total construction effort just figuring out where things are. But the contingency of the construction we help bring that cost typically down in half. So you're saving 5% to 10% on the construction side. So the return on investment is significant.

Bill McGeeney: 3:39

And cities really don't know where the streetlights are. Is that because it was owned by, say, an electric company or something? It's varying degrees.

Nick Mesler: 3:45

I mean, you know, I'd say most cities that we've dealt with, they know where maybe 60 to 70% of their streetlights are physically. They have a data set and they say I have a streetlight at this exact point, but they're often missing things. These are databases that are not updated regularly. The information that's associated with that is not maintained in any standardized way. In some cases there are purchases that are made back from utility, so they have to start from scratch and they might not know where any of their infrastructure is. Or in some cases they might know we have three streetlights on this block, but what kind of streetlight? Is it a floodlight? Is it a pedestrian post-op? Is it a Cobra Head streetlight Something they often don't know.

Nick Mesler: 4:29

You don't think of those things? No, so that's been a lot of what we've done over the years. More recently, we've been getting into streetlight master planning and then what that is is taking all that data we've collected, we know where everything is. Now we're helping answer the question of why are you providing this streetlight here? Does it serve any specific purpose? I think of a streetlight that's outside of your house. What is it doing there, does it?

Isa Mohammed: 4:56

have a purpose. Is it really needed?

Nick Mesler: 4:58

I have a question, nick. That's good. A lot of people don't? A lot of people don't think about the street lighting until something's wrong or there's a thing flickering Right, right. So you know what is it really doing. There Is what's installed, appropriate for the application.

Nick Mesler: 5:12

We found that, you know, most street lighting systems that were first installed were done so back in the 50s and 60s, before they truly understood the science of street lighting or lighting in general, street lighting or lighting in general. So now we're stuck with these legacy systems and it's, you know, incumbent on the engineers and lighting designers today to take what we have and make the best of it and provide street lighting in a way that's intentional and it's appropriate to the conditions. So not only looking at this from a traffic safety perspective or looking at crime. We're looking at environmental impact, sensitive habitat areas, light pollution light trespass is a big one and trying to find balance in the system and make specific, targeted recommendations rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, which is much of what historical street lighting design has been, particularly over the last 10, 15 years. With LED conversions.

Nick Mesler: 6:07

They've said all right, we're going to put in five or six different street light types, we're going to do that everywhere and if it's a arterial street, every arterial street is getting this type of street light. Every local street is getting this type of street light. And they said, all right, let's call it a day, let's keep it simple. But we found that in doing so it's created a lot of negative externalities. We're starting to identify more and more issues with that by not having a nuanced target approach. So what we do with the data that we collect is we build digital models of cities Think of it as like Google Earth, but for street lighting and I can tell you with that data where exactly you have illumination being provided and where you don't, and quantify that and say is this appropriate for this context or is it not, and what would we recommend? And we're starting to do that in cities across the US and hopefully beyond soon.

Bill McGeeney: 6:57

Nick, what role is machine learning or AI playing in this process for you guys?

Nick Mesler: 7:03

Yeah, some newer stuff we're getting into. So we know where all the streetlights are, we know what the existing conditions are, we know what's appropriate, what the standards or the local municipality or even just people that live and work in these cities have told us what they want their street lighting to look like. We can take all that information and then say, all right, let's optimize the system. Instead of saying we're going to propose every street light on this block is going to be exactly the same. We're going to dim down or up appropriate to those conditions. We're going to effectively say this street light should be dimmed to 80%, this one 90%, 70%. Streetlights should be dimmed to 80 percent, this one 90, 70 percent, such that we're optimizing the energy efficiency of the system.

Nick Mesler: 7:51

We're not over lighting in any stretch of the word, but we're doing our best to really get that right. And this is something that just wasn't feasible. You know, even just a short while ago, the technology didn't exist, we didn't have the capabilities to do so, didn't exist. We didn't have the capabilities to do so. And it's something that we've been developing to help answer this question so that we're lighting spaces appropriately, whether that's to the criteria, if that's what the city wants us to do the recommended practice approach, or if they have slightly different needs, based on feedback from the community or city stakeholders.

Bill McGeeney: 8:21

Well, I want to kick into the warm-up for this episode, and it pegs off of one of the things you just talked about, where a public works masterpiece up in New York, at the corner of 6th Avenue and Lipson-Ards Street, has installed a traffic light that's been upside down since May of 2024. Not one person ever reported the 311. Good times, so that's, I presume, nick. This is not an odd occurrence.

Nick Mesler: 8:53

So my background is in traffic engineering and I believe you and me, we saw the whole gamut of unusual things and in places like New York, you know where this occurred.

Isa Mohammed: 9:04

Not surprised at all isa, I see you smiling down there. Well, I mean it it. It goes to show how how much people missed the, the light that was now going up instead of coming down. It's a street light. Yeah, that was installed upside down this.

Bill McGeeney: 9:20

This was a traffic control light, this, so it's not even a street one.

Nick Mesler: 9:26

Oh my god all right, you know it's funny, I, I, I, they pulled, uh, they pulled americans at one point. What? What is the order of the light? Green, yellow, red, what is the order that's supposed to be? And it turns out it's like 10 to 15 percent of people had it backwards. So, you know, as a, as a driver, we're often thinking you know it's in the periphery of what's going on. You know, as a, as a driver, we're often thinking you know it's in the periphery of what's going on. You know, I think it's not surprising that you know they see the red light like, okay, it's red. You're not necessarily paying attention to the exact order, but still the fact that no one, no one caught this is, uh, it's kind of hilarious.

Bill McGeeney: 10:18

Nick, you've lived on the East coast, which I'm sure is the same as in LA and some other areas. The red is just another sign for green. Really, it's just. You know, I grew up in New Jersey.

Bill McGeeney: 10:27

I had a saying if a radical idea in streetlighting back in the 1920s Eliminate glare and adequately illuminate surfaces, he did so by creating a fixture that capped the light at the top, forcing the light to bounce downward, while also shielding the element to prevent horizontal escape, ie glare. The fixture didn't win over everyone, of course, as the owner of the fixtures, copenhagen Energy, ended up removing some shading to enhance the brightness. However, henningsen, again unsuccessfully, attempted to improve lighting in the 60s with the advent of even newer and brighter lights, once again trying to re-angle and remove glare. Fast forward to 2025, many cities haven't undertaken this and you just mentioned, nick you mentioned you were helping in actually counting all the fixtures In Philadelphia. Here, we're projected to have a savings of $8 million from our new fancy LED lights. However, the projected cost is going to be $91 million, supposedly amortized over the course of a decade. These costs, nick, do you know who bears the cost?

Nick Mesler: 11:28

Yeah, so the way these projects are typically set up is that you have an energy savings corporation effectively administering the project. They hire the consultants to do the engineering. They hire the bucket trucks that are contracted to install the new lights. They hire Avari to tell us where the streetlights are. Their role is, in a way, to effectively act as a bank. There's a big upfront capital cost that's amortized over this period of 10 years or whatever it may be. In some cases it's pretty short, maybe three or four years. After that three or four-year period, once all that capital expenditure upfront is paid off, it's effectively money in the bank. All that energy savings is just money that you're saving on your monthly electric bill from the city to use for whatever.

Bill McGeeney: 12:14

For the city to use on something else, because their taxes aren't going to go down right.

Nick Mesler: 12:18

No, it's. Typically it's used for other municipal projects. In some cases street lighting improvements in neighborhoods that haven't been receiving the same access to quality street lighting historically. They might be significantly underlit. They may not be meeting the recommended practice. It may just be too dark for that given context in an urban environment. And in other cases it's made for undergrounding of, you know, electrical utilities, you know, as a way to remove, you know, the visual clutter from the perspective of someone walking, biking or driving. In some cases also used as a means of mitigating wildfires.

Bill McGeeney: 13:01

Yeah, that actually does make sense. The glare so with the new LEDs they've put in around here, the glare is hit or miss, right. We have some of these white, very glary, very painfully glary lights. They have to. I mean, I don't know if they give you eye damage or not, but I can't imagine how they don't. Coating warmer, I want to say 3000, maybe a little below 3000 Kelvin lights, and they look nice, they're good, I mean they're, they're, they're pleasurable to walk under.

Bill McGeeney: 13:32

The problem is that a lot of them are over lit in neighborhoods. So the neighborhoods are closer together and you have this light that is really designed for a, you know, east coast. It's really designed for a two lane road, but the road is really one or one and a half lanes and it ends up going into everyone's property, into their windows, into natural areas. So why isn't shielding just I mean shielding camp? It's not expensive for shielding, right? So why isn't it just commonplace to go with shielding first and then remove that shielding? For the life of me, I don't understand that one. Can you help me here? So that's a great question.

Nick Mesler: 14:06

It's interesting, particularly in the case of Philadelphia. It was back in the 80s or 90s, I believe. There was a public works director who had a policy for the city of Philadelphia that the street lighting would come keyhole to keyhole at your front door instead of at the property line, which is what most other cities have, and that was largely a crime-driven perspective. It was a concern that, well, you might be safe on the sidewalk, but if someone's hiding just out in the shadows and you're coming up to your door, there's someone right behind you. You know they want to be well-illuminated and take the onus of that off private citizens and you know whatever is. You know what they want to do with their front doors. That was the decision making process at the time and in a way, you know I think the city of Philadelphia is inheriting that decision making. As far as actual, you know the capital expenditure, the investment necessary to put in shielding you're right, not very expensive If you, you know you're at least somewhat proactive and you choose a technology that makes sense and is something that can be swapped out easily. House side shields are fairly inexpensive. In some cases they can be fabricated on site. You'll see things that look like pie tins around a streetlight so that it's directing the flow of that illuminance in its intended direction. In some cases there's a decision not to put in shielding and that decision is sometimes intended to improve the visual perception of someone walking on a sidewalk, for example. If you have light just shining down, you imagine a streetlight right above you. It's only illuminating the top of your head. What you really want is light shining on you, the vertical surface of your body and things around you. So if you have light reflecting off of the sides of buildings or other surfaces, it creates a more inviting visual perception to someone that's walking around, to someone that's walking around. So that's some of the calculus.

Nick Mesler: 16:02

But I think you know largely. You know now that we have LED technology it's a matter of adjusting how our design practices and what's recommended, because things are just so different than the old high-pressure sodium or mercury vapor streetlights that we got used to. The design choices and design criteria haven't necessarily kept up with LED technology. So I'd envision probably in the near future there's going to be a lot of cities that are asking where do I need to make this capital expenditure If I'm going around installing new streetlights? It's a great opportunity to add those anyway, instead of having to roll a truck to do that as a separate cost. What we're doing at Avari is we know where all your buildings are. We know where all your streetlights are, so we can build these digital models. We can tell you exactly which streetlights are shining in on bedroom windows because I have a database of all the streetlights. I have a database of all the buildings so we can start reverse engineering where those should be and start making those recommendations.

Bill McGeeney: 17:06

Yeah, nick, I've seen some of these shieldings in practice and they work great. The light goes exactly where it needs to go. There's a little faint glow off that's like a gradient off of where it needs to go, but it's not bad. If you're in a natural area, it's probably not going to impact that natural zone. It's probably not going to. It's definitely not going to impact that natural zone. It's definitely not going to impact someone's window. That you can still see relatively clearly with the light. I think there's a lot of potential here. I just wish it wasn't so incumbent as me, the resident, to constantly nag the city and say, hey, I would like this, hey, I would like this, hey, I would like this. And then eventually someone actually emails you back or someone picks up the phone and actually talks to you, and it's a very frustrating thing to see, you know, but that's my experience. Maybe other people have had a much better experience, I don't know.

Mark Baker: 17:52

This issue with the streetlights that Nick has brought up. I think this is my opinion about LEDs. Leds are a directional light source and what Nick said is that's actually not the best for human vision. You want this sort of gently radiating out light, that's sort of dispersing out and illuminating at a low level all of the objects around us. You don't want a spotlight. So these LED array streetlights that have these little chips with very intense light and that's not spatially uniform within those little chips, and then you have a gap and then they use a blue rich light source. It's the wrong technology and we don't believe that actually you're going to get back and ever make the LED. It's not an appropriate technology for illuminating a large area. So if you look at the high pressure sodium lamps I'm not an expert on this, but they're big, the bigger the better, and they have these beveled glass things that sort of put some of the light at different angles and the large space makes that light go out in sort of different directions and it worked perfectly.

Mark Baker: 19:04

And this where I used to live in California, in the Bay Area, before they put the LEDs in, I came home and I enjoyed coming home to my place at night. Right, it's sort of an orangish, purplish, amber color. It's gentle, it had a kind of a mood to it, and then I would go into my apartment and then we would walk, my partner and I. We would walk around the town at night. They came in and then they put in 5,000 Kelvin LED streetlights. I was living on the second floor, my kitchen was on the second floor. The LED streetlight came right into my living room and flooded my living room with this LED light. The blue, rich light is terrifying. And then we stopped our walks. We couldn't walk around anymore. I contacted the city and this is when they first came out. So this was just, you know, when LEDs first came out and you know it was such a battle with the city to get them to change five lights. Well, okay, well, we'll do five lights in your neighborhood, Mark. It's absurdly hard to deal with a city. It's painfully hard for the services you pay for that you can't have access to.

Mark Baker: 20:19

Anyway, Commission, there's a case number that's been going on for about three or four years. They finally they took all the public comments which, like a couple hundred comments, Softlight's foundation submitted many of them. They heard the oral arguments a few months ago. So they're now in this decision-making process and so some of the complaints were it's too bright. Some of the complaints were getting a migraine and some of the complaints were I'm having a seizure every time I step outside my house.

Mark Baker: 20:48

So this is an issue now. You know, it's just a tiny village. It's a battle between the utility company, National Grid, the village of Cambridge, the tiny little town, and then the state of New York, of course, has been pushing what they call energy efficient lighting. But these costs that they haven't amortized are the health costs. I mean, what's the impact on this one person's life who now has a seizure and can't leave her house? What's the impact on these people that are having the migraines because of the LED light, et cetera? So the agencies are only looking at these like just superficial costs, like dollars, but not actually accounting for hospital visits, medical, and you know the increased risk of cancer now among young people has greatly increased and we're pretty sure that's because of blue rich lighting that's in our environment.

Bill McGeeney: 21:40

Mark, so you're in favor of bringing back the old sodiums?

Mark Baker: 21:44

Yeah. So some of the things that you can look at is like, well, we wanted this energy efficiency, but we have some stuff on our website from people that have created information to sort of say, well, yeah, but you didn't do this. For example, one of the examples would be low pressure sodium. Now, this has the highest luminous efficacy of any light source that we know 200 lumens per watt, way better than LEDs, but without these other catastrophic problems, so you could bring those back. Some people might say, oh, I don't like that color, okay, well, you could still go with high-pressure sodium. But a lot of the high-pressure sodiums are, let's say, 200 watts, maybe 500 watts, maybe 100 watts. Okay, what if you cut it in half? Maybe 500 watts, maybe 100 watts, okay, what if you cut it in half? You would be having a 50 energy savings by just simply putting in a different, lower intensity, high pressure sodium and people would not notice. I'm pretty sure that nobody would say, oh, now I can't see anymore. I'm pretty sure that a 50 watt high pressure sodium, it will be fine.

Mark Baker: 22:41

Another thing that has been discovered that a lot of the lights that people complained about were like so dim. It's so dim because it was full of dirt, leaves and bugs and stuff got in there, and so the glass. There's all this dirt in it. They don't know where their streetlights are. They're not sending anybody out there to clean the streetlights, and so if you just go out and clean the bugs out, then your light output would increase. So there's all these solutions without having to switch to LED. That is so really, it's just a really, really poor choice for trying to illuminate a large volume space.

Bill McGeeney: 23:15

Hey, mark, I'm going to play devil's advocate to your conversation here, because the LEDs, the light barring, the way that it's put into a community, in theory should be just enough light coming down on the surface and needs to illuminate, and the light in theory shouldn't be going horizontal right. With sodium lights there's no shielding, like it's going everywhere, it's going in, it's intrusive lighting and the intrusive lighting that you had in your place, wouldn't that that's more of an issue of the actual incompetence by the city? Right then, it is. No, I'm being serious. Like isn't that an issue? Incompetence by city rather than actually, you know, having good practice, or am I right? Is that? Is that a wrong? You're?

Mark Baker: 24:00

absolutely right. It's a tricky thing. This stuff light is complex, so there's that's why they're so difficult. But let me tell you a story. I, just as an experiment, I just bought a bollard light. So I wanted to see if I could experiment with that, because this keeps the light low to the ground. So a bollard is about three feet high, one meter high, and it has these louvers on it and you can put a light bulb in. Now this is sort of a side thing, but a lot of these bollard lights are now coming with the LEDs built in, so when it burns out and it doesn't work, you have to throw away the whole bollard.

Mark Baker: 24:34

So I looked really, really, really careful to make sure I can get a screw and light bulb kind. So this arrived in the mail and then it's designed to be wired, but I want to demonstrate it to people. So I was rewiring and putting electrical extension cord et cetera. I just got it going last night and I want to experiment to see what the light looks like. So I got it running last night. It's about three feet high and with the louvers it was great.

Mark Baker: 24:59

It illuminated my driveway so that I could see to walk. It's just a little tiny. It's an amber LED light bulb, you know like I don't know four or five watts, so it was a tiny amount of light but I could see perfectly and for a large distance. The only thing that I didn't like was that it was a non-frosted bulb, and so if I was at a certain angle the intensity of the LED was hitting me right in the eye. It's amber, so it wasn't like terrifying, but it was still in too intense. So tonight I'm going to try a frosted bulb. But one of my questions maybe Nick could talk about it would be that I think that car headlights light the road. That's what they're for. They have headlights For lighting pedestrian pathways and such. I think maybe you should have bollards. Don't have this light splaying all over the place. Reduce your light pollution by keeping it closer to the ground. What do you think, nick?

Nick Mesler: 25:52

Yeah, so bollard lighting is something that's being tested for pedestrian safety. One of the big issues is that that light is being shied out vertically, so it does a good job of illuminating the vertical surfaces of things, illuminating pedestrians, and that's why it's being tested for things like crosswalk safety. But it does have light that's shining directly into the atmosphere and they're also finding that if you're shining light even 10 degrees down from horizontal surface. So imagine if you're shining light directly horizontal to the ground out in the atmosphere, anything 10 degrees below and anything above would be considered direct source light pollution. Of course, there's also indirect light pollution, something that LEDs do generate.

Nick Mesler: 26:38

One of the advantages of LEDs has been that, if done properly, which would require really three things, is is the is the initial luminous intensity, it's the average color temperature, the average wavelength and it's and bug rating being the final one. Bug rating is an interesting term. It's bug, backlight, uplight and glare. That's considered the three different types of obtrusive lighting. Backlight is the light shining in under a window. It's back from the fixture. Uplight is straight up or above 10% from horizontal. And glare. Now you can't just put all those ratings to zero. If you did that, you would end up with just these pencils of lighting and you would have a very narrow cone of where light is being provided.

Nick Mesler: 27:25

So if you want to accomplish a more light pollution friendly alternative, there is an ability for LEDs to provide that, but with some caveats. You have to provide a very low color temperature. You can't have any uplight and you have to find a balance with mitigating the effects of backlight and glare. The ability to do so is that's being provided by LEDs and still providing a visual field that's comforting to most people and obviously not everyone. Why it's become popular is because the color rendering index, or ability to see color with LEDs, is fairly significant. You're able to reduce the wattage that's being output from a light source, be able to cut it effectively in a third and yet see better, because your ability to identify colors and contrast between different objects is significantly better, and it's the ability to mitigate trip hazards, and all the while, you're still reducing the amount of light pollution that's being created. Ballard lighting doesn't necessarily provide that, because it's shining light vertically would be like that scattering out into the atmosphere.

Mark Baker: 28:38

Nick, just to double check, the one I bought has louvers on it. I don't agree that it's shining out light vertically. It's actually angled down onto the ground. Are you speaking of non-louvered bollards?

Nick Mesler: 28:50

Bollard lighting is often done in very small areas where it's providing illumination. You did have a comment as well as lighting that's being provided on the roadway. Now, headlights do provide illumination along roadways. The standard guidance is such that if your roadway is signed for less than 35 miles an hour, theoretically you don't need roadway lighting. The headlights should do all the work. However, we still have that in many locations. We still have street lighting on low-speed roadways because street lighting is there. Its intended purpose is to mitigate the effects of glare from headlights, so you're finding a balance in that system. You have glare from headlights. Illumination provided by street lights on the ground is improving the ability for drivers to see when driving. Bollard lighting. From a pedestrian's perspective, it's often done in localized areas To provide the minimum amount of illumination required for comfortable walking for most pedestrians. You need a significant amount of them in order to provide even distribution of illumination.

Bill McGeeney: 29:58

So, Nick, I do have a quick question before we move on here. What if communities turned down the light gradually overnight?

Nick Mesler: 30:09

Yeah, that's starting to become more popular, particularly with things like lighting controls.

Nick Mesler: 30:11

There's this idea called shouldering, where you have the light that comes up as the day turns to dusk in the night, you slowly bring up your lights and then at a certain designated time, you can turn down the output of that light.

Nick Mesler: 30:26

What they're finding is that, from a visual perspective, if you cut the wattage in half of the streetlight, it doesn't cut in half your visual perception of how well you can see. So you can cut the amount of illumination being provided pretty significantly and still see fairly well, particularly when you have low amounts of traffic, low pedestrian vehicle conflicts, and still see pretty well. And in particular, if you have, you know, let's say, a quiet residential neighborhood where you don't really have much of anyone walking around at night, there's even some communities that are starting to turn those lights off altogether. There's an energy savings component to it and obviously it's a very dark skies friendly approach as well. Network lighting controls is something that's been able to provide that. Lighting controls have been around for a long time, but the technology is finally in a place where it's very effective and is reliable to work.

Bill McGeeney: 31:24

Nick, I want to go real quickly to one of the articles that you actually submitted for the show today, and there's a study you submitted, one of the studies out 2021 from Virginia Tech regarding pedestrian crosswalk lighting. And here in beautiful Philadelphia we live between two major roads and one of them they put in these new blinky pedestrian crossing areas. Someone took out one of the signs. They just obliterated the sign. So what they did was they moved it way behind the sidewalk. When it lights up, it blinks, but it's harder for the driver to see it. What's the current research? Where do we go with creating awareness situations for drivers at pedestrian crosswalks? I know in many cities people actually slow down. Here.

Nick Mesler: 32:10

it's cars first, people second yes, it's interesting that you know they. They move back the. I'm assuming what was our call it? A rrfb, a rapid rectangular flashing beacon, so it's rectangular signs on the cross. Assuming it's one of those, there's specific standards on the placement for it's one of those. There's specific standards on the placement for those. So I'm surprised they moved it back. That wouldn't necessarily be an appropriate design.

Bill McGeeney: 32:32

Everyone in the neighborhood was pretty shocked by that too.

Nick Mesler: 32:35

Yeah, you know things happen. But from an illumination perspective, there's beginning to be a significant body of research on what is the appropriate way to illuminate pedestrian facilities and crosswalks in general. Most of lighting has been very intentionally for drivers we have and pedestrians have been an afterthought. That study you mentioned in 2021 for Virginia Tech, that was a study that was focused on what was the appropriate amount of illumination to provide. They're even finding that providing too much light is creating a less safe environment.

Nick Mesler: 33:10

Again, it's about finding a balance and providing the amount of illumination that's appropriate. Particularly if you have a lot of glare, people start to look away from where they're going. If you're taking your eyes off the road, obviously it's a less safe environment. So it's about getting that right. Overlighting not necessarily the solution, and there's some discussion around what the appropriate color temperature is. You don't see a huge difference in the color temperature that's being provided from those illumination sources the color temperature that's being provided from those illumination sources, which effectively means you can still provide safe pedestrian lighting with lowering your color temperature, something that was more dark skies friendly, for example.

Bill McGeeney: 33:55

Well, it's more human health friendly and ecologically friendly. That's true too, yeah.

Nick Mesler: 33:59

You know one interesting thing that I'm not sure if it's been mentioned on this podcast before, but you know why a lot of cities initially opted for 5,000 Kelvin street lighting. So the thinking at the time back it's 2010, 2012, when LED streetlights first started coming online is they use 5,000 Kelvin because it most closely matched the moon. I thought that was natural. Yeah, I've heard that I thought that was a natural approach to street lighting and that would be, you know, know, the best thing to provide. Very quickly realized that, you know, wasn't the right thing to do. You know there's been other aspects of led technology that you know the industry is learning, glare being a significant one, that we need to kind of recalibrate the standards and approach to lighting design. You know, completely, a completely different technology.

Bill McGeeney: 34:44

Well, in other street lighting news, this one somehow evaded me and I want to get into. Here's a little lead into our ecology side here. For you at home who listens regularly, you'll recall that we had some ecological articles in the past discussing the vulnerability of seawater birds to artificial light at night and what the Conservation Council of Hawaii Executive Director, Director Janetta Peters, phrased as Hawaii is the endangered species capital of the world. Hawaiian Electric Company and municipal leaders, such as Maui Mayor Richard Bisson, have claimed that obtaining responsible LED fixtures that utilize warm colors and lower the brightness is too much effort to help protect these shearwater birds.

Bill McGeeney: 35:26

In January 2024, Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit, issued an intent to sue Maui County and Hawaii Electric Company should they not comply with the Endangered Species Act provision to protect listed species. The suit was officially filed in November 2024, alleging three defendants the Hawaiian Electric Company, Maui Electric Company and the County of Maui. The issue apparently has been a drumbeat that is dating back to 2019. Not all is lost. Hawaiian Electric Company actually entered into an agreement with the Conservation council to provide $480,000 to habitat growth for Hawaiian seabirds, including lowering power lines and adding additional power line diverters. The remaining issue appears to be the stubborn one of streetlights. When I see these type of articles, I kind of scratch my head and I think is this more of an issue of bureaucracy? Is this what we're talking about here?

Nick Mesler: 36:29

This is an interesting one. My company has actually inventoried the county of Maui so we know where all the streetlights are and we've walked through the streets. We even went into Lahaina following the fires to see what was still standing as part of this effort. They were in the midst of an LED conversion and then this ordinance came in and they basically put the brakes on everything and they're trying. There's really a mix of things happening simultaneously and, if you probably ask me, in a month there'd probably be a new update.

Nick Mesler: 37:01

But that ordinance that was passed in Maui County. They had a very specific criteria. The municipal code itself is very short and the criteria that they were looking for was that outdoor lighting has to be less than 2% blue light. So if you have, you know in a place like Maui County they have very significantly high energy costs and you know LED technology is very attractive to lowering your energy costs overall. So you know, with that technology in mind, meeting that 2% blue light standard is rather difficult. They've been working with manufacturers to identify a product that could provide that, while also meeting other lighting design criteria, and last I heard and now this is a few months ago is that they established that they could provide that they would be able to meet that 2% blue light standard that's been set forth by the municipal code and still illuminate roadways appropriately.

Nick Mesler: 38:01

I also heard you know things that it was just, you know, people that were getting involved in the conversations that didn't understand lighting and they thought that the color temperature should match the yellow light on a traffic light one for one and that that should be what they're providing. But you know that's a rather arbitrary statement to make. I don't know how true that is. This is something that was kind of heard down through the grapevine, but I think that you know they came out with this. You know this, this municipal code, and you know I like it. You know 2 percent blue light, I think, is something worth a lag in that the manufacturers had to find a new solution and you know things that have been talked about on this show is that you know regulation is often the way to. You know, improving outcomes, particularly around lighting technology, and this is an example of that. They would never have gotten to a 2% blue light LED fixture but because they required and there's a sale at stake they were willing to invest their R&D efforts to make that possible.

Bill McGeeney: 39:14

That's a really good point. Thank you for bringing this all full circle here. That's a great description there, nick. In other ecology news this probably is no surprise, given what we already know about artificial light and its effect on water-based ecosystems. A study in global change biology found that artificial light shone down in areas containing coral reefs extended hours of prey. Artificial light actually promoted activity in daytime fish all throughout the night, drawing in continued predation and exhaustion amongst fish in those lit areas. The study fits in with other studies, including one particular we saw a few months back where artificial light at night changed pond ecologies through predation. You can find those studies and all of our ecology articles over on the research tab of our website, lightpollutionnewscom.

Bill McGeeney: 40:03

Also notable this month, a study out of the Journal of Experimental Biology found that exposure to artificial light at night changed the brain's processing characteristics of early development stages of zebrafish. The fish in this control study experienced they showed a bias toward a particular hemisphere of their brain. Those exposed to artificial light at night did not exhibit that partitioning. For instance, the control group processed visually via utilizing the right hemisphere of their brain, while the exposed group did not show any preference for hemisphere processing. And there's a very exceptional study in marine biology that looked at the effects, if any, of artificial light at night on coastal habitat. Of over 57 studies definitely worth the look, and this last one here from Biological Journal of Linnean Society researchers looked at a spotted wing fruit fly agricultural pest. The artificial light at night decreased mating activities in both rural and urban populations, with the urban population understood to have more exposure to routine artificial light at night. However, egg-laying activity increased in rural populations over that of the urban populations when exposed to artificial light at night, indicating urban populations of flies have adapted to their always bright 24-7 environment.

Bill McGeeney: 41:29

Before I give you guys a shout out, before you start winding things down, I just want to go in here and talk real fast for the health news that we didn't get to last episode. First off from the environmental research by utilizing generalized outdoor brightness assessment via satellite imagery, a study size of 1, of 24,147 found exposure to environments with light pollution experienced a positive association with type 2 diabetes. This held true for correlation to air pollution. There was also an additional correlation with light pollution and fossil fuel-derived nitrous oxide on type 2 diabetes. Onward from ecotoxicology and environmental safety, we have a study identifying that artificial light at night in a bedroom was positively associated with glucose metabolism markers.

Bill McGeeney: 42:38

The study looked at 256 out of an initial 484 participants. The participants excluded apparently failed to fulfill data capture requirements. Of the 256 individuals who remained, they recorded light exposures via a light monitoring device. They also wore a device to measure their nighttime sleep and manually noted mealtimes, while also providing fasting blood samples. So those round out the health news. Now we're almost through this month's show here and I want to give you guys a chance. How can people find Nick? We've been talking a lot this episode. How can people learn more about what it is you're up to?

Nick Mesler: 43:21

Feel free to follow me on LinkedIn. You can search me for Nick Messler. You can find me there If you'll go to ivariluxsolutionscom. We are constantly updating with new projects and digital models of cities that we're working in. You can pan to a city that we've been in, type in an address and see what the lighting looks like in that environment, and always available via call or email. Love to talk more about cool stuff we're doing.

Bill McGeeney: 43:47

Excellent. All right, isa, I know we haven't heard from you much this episode, but hey, how can people learn more about what you're doing down there in Trinidad and Tobago?

Isa Mohammed: 43:56

We have our website, caribbeanastronomycom. Right now we're actually in the process of updating that, so in the process of updating that. So probably the best place will be through our Facebook group and you could just search that as Karina C-A-R-I-N-A, and we have pretty much everything there and also on Instagram. Again, search Karina.

Bill McGeeney: 44:13

Did you guys do anything big for the occultation of Mars?

Isa Mohammed: 44:17

Not the occult. Actually, we had a pretty big event last night because there was a conjunction of Venus and Saturn in the west and Mars pretty much at opposition in the east. And at our public observatory, the Vela Observatory, we actually had our first real public night on 300 people plus. So it was a nice, wonderful, successful event. So we're really happy to have had that one under our belts recently.

Bill McGeeney: 44:41

Well, very glad to hear you, sir. Keep up the good work down there, mark. How can people learn more about the Softlight Foundation? Yeah, bill.

Mark Baker: 44:51

Softlights plural S-O-F-T-L-I-G-H-T-S, dot O-R-G. That's our website. We're in all the social media. We'd like you to sign our petition on changeorg. If you type in changeorg ban blinding headlights, please add your name to that. Also on softlightsorg, you can submit an LED incident report and let the government know that LEDs are harming you. We submit those to the Food and Drug Administration once per month and if you submit something and then you'll be notified if something happens.

Bill McGeeney: 45:29

Okay, there we have it, let's round out. We've just got a handful more to do, one really interesting one at the end. I want to first congratulate the new communities that have been designated or recognized. Congratulations to Antelope, oregon. Important note that town provided the residents with free dark sky, approved light bulbs, and this is an important piece of the puzzle. There. Cottonwood Canyon State Park located in Wasco, oregon, also becomes an international dark sky park and Brown's Canyon National Monument in Colorado becomes a international dark sky park.

Bill McGeeney: 46:02

So there was an article that came out, and I think this is a really good one to end on. If you've ever tried to explain the brightness it's kind of like sky brightness to folks you've undoubtedly found, and you've seen on this show, that there's no one unified measure. Hence we have an intriguing article from Urban Science that proposes a new scale based on measured values akin to those you'd identify using sky quality meter. I think what the authors are proposing kind of it makes plenty of sense. Currently we have sky brightness qualifications, but they don't at all have any unified scientific application, and here they're trying to build one model that can be used for multiple applications.

Bill McGeeney: 46:44

Currently we have techniques that include magnitudes per square arc. Second, for devices such as sky quality meters, we have candelas per square meter for luminance measures, we have satellite radiance measurements, we have natural sky brightness measures that identify how many times brighter the sky is against the natural sky, and we have the amorphous Bortles scale. The authors proposed a more nuanced scale with the ability to exceed or underwhelm on either end of that measure. For instance, the current measure often ends at a certain low magnitude threshold. The proposed measurements would eliminate an ending and starting threshold to allow for an infinite scalable measurement in either direction, hence provide a uniform, detailed tool that could be used for everything from urban planning to health advisories and more. What do you guys think about that? Do we need a unified way of understanding what degree of brightness night is?

Isa Mohammed: 47:44

You know, as an astronomer, we use the arc seconds, the brightness per arc second, one that you find on the sky quality meter, and, yeah, I'm not sure if it would help to have a different measure. What I would like to see is just better data overall in terms of sky brightness, because I think there's a big gap in the data right now in terms of the frequency spectrum, especially because we use the satellite radiation that upward light and the satellites that we have right now are not very good in the blue spectrum and as we switch to LEDs, it's causing all the numbers to be reported badly and I think that's a really big problem. If this revised method of measuring or coming up with a set of units that could measure the data, if it helps with that problem and helps give us a better overall picture, then I'm all for it. I think what we really need is more and better data.

Mark Baker: 48:46

I agree with that statement that you need better data for sure. Let's say you're a city. They often have regulations related to a specific luminaire Okay, this luminaire cannot exceed 3000K but they don't have a regulation or some kind of a goal for the overall light pollution for the city. They may need a satellite for that. So they need something qualities to that they could measure and say are we meeting our goals? They need to know that, so that data is really important.

Nick Mesler: 49:15

Yeah, it's certainly helping the work that we're doing. There's probably a half dozen different researchers that are trying to quantify what light pollution is and what is one street light's contribution to that. And if I want to put in a different street light in, how is that going to impact light pollution? Can I quantify that and use that as part of my comparative analysis? Not just how much money am I going to save on my electric bill, how many car crashes am I going to prevent? But on the other side of that equation, what is the reduction in electric bill? How many car crashes am I going to prevent? But on the other side of that equation, what is the reduction in light pollution? How many birds am I going to save? How many pollinators I'm going to save? That's really valuable because birds and pollinators don't come to city council hearings and complain. But knowing what the impact is and being able to quantify it I don't know what it is, but I know it's not zero and it would be a big help in formulating those conversations.

Isa Mohammed: 50:09

Do we need to break this out into different frequencies Like, for example, lower frequency lighting versus higher frequency lighting have different impacts, right, and if you boil everything to one number, then it doesn't capture that difference in frequency, so at some point we need to start differentiating when we're talking about light pollution.

Nick Mesler: 50:27

Totally. Cct is a number often used, but it's a terrible number. It's a terrible way of describing the frequencies of light that's being emitted from a point source. The lighting community is trying to come up with a different way to provide this answer because just giving a number 3,000 Kelvin it's easy for us to throw that number around and understand what it means, but a 3,000 Kelvin rating from one fixture to another could be providing very different frequencies of-.

Isa Mohammed: 50:57

Because you could combine wavelengths into one thing, so you could have peaks in different areas, right? So you could have one peak, that's all the way in the blue, being offset by one that's all the way in the red, theoretically, and you end up with a sort of Kelvin, but it's not really, you know, accomplishing what we're trying to accomplish, is it?

Nick Mesler: 51:14

There's research and initiatives amongst the Latin community to answer that, but they've been trying for almost 10 years now. So it's going to be less of a research question but a creative solution to providing this in a way that is something easy for people to understand. You can go to Home Depot and pull the right fixture off the shelf, but once that happens, it's going to be huge for mitigating light pollution.

Mark Baker: 51:40

But it's a good point, because there are so many creatures that see beyond human visible. They see an ultraviolet, they see an infrared, and so paying attention to their needs as well, it just makes it so much more complicated. But you know, we should be smart enough to try and figure it out. But having this one CCT thing which is so archaic and really doesn't address the LED LEDs are spatially non-uniform and very tiny spaces, and so there's spatial issues as well. Yeah, but you know, it's just so much easier to comprehend one number, so it's a tricky business.

Bill McGeeney: 52:18

Well said, everyone you know. Wouldn't it be neat if we could live in a even cities of the future where you had your pollinators? Like you said, nick, you had your, you know, the birds could fly through, people felt safe at night and you could look up and actually see more than just 50 stars? That would be, you know. I think it's something we can do.

Bill McGeeney: 52:39

I think it's something we can do and, nick, you're helping to pave the route to do that, and hopefully our communities can continue to work in that direction. I want to thank my guests this month SoftLights Foundation, mr Mark Baker, the Caribbean Institute of Astronomy's, issa Mohamed, and the very accomplished civil engineer, nick Messler. Thank you guys for joining me today. I really appreciate your time. You guys put together some great details and I think the listener at home really appreciates that, so thank you.

Bill McGeeney: 53:10

Light Pollution News was recorded on January 19th 2025. You can learn more about today's show by clicking on the link page in the show notes description, or you can reach out to us on nearly all platforms, including Instagram, facebook, linkedin, youtube. You can also directly text us via the show link in the show notes or simply email me at bill at lightpollutionnewscom. If you reach out for feedback, I'll read it on the air and otherwise, if I don't hear you until next month. I hope you have a great rest of your February. I'm your host, bill McGeaney, reminding you to only shine a light where it's needed.