24/7 Streetlights

Last week I went to a Korea Market on El Camino Real. When I drove home, I happened to notice that all the streetlights along the El Camino Real from Lawrence Express Way to Mary Blvd were glowing. It was around 3pm. That really surprised me. Actually, it has not been the first time that I see streetlights all on during daytime at Silicon Valley. I could not imagine that so many lights were all on in a pretty nice sunny afternoon. I think that most of the people will have the same wonder—have these streetlights ever been off?
There have been so many debates about light pollution and environment pollution caused by public facilities, streetlights especially. It is really hard to figure out whether the government has not noticed that or it will cost more to turn the lights off. Although lots of cities have been using energy-saving lamps, keeping all the streetlights on during the daytime is absolutely not a good strategy. It is taxpayers’ money who affords all the facility costs, why don’t we just turn the lights off and use the money to support better education in our city or help more people struggling with poverty. According to an article on USA today last year, if a timer is placed on 3,000 streetlights that shuts lights off for 5.5 hours, $400,000 a year will be saved. How about we double the time? From 7am to 6pm, shutting 3,000 streetlights off for 11hours each day will save $800,000 a year! Moreover, I think we can shut far more than 3,000 local streetlights off in each city. If we also count on the lights on freeways, the amount of money that will be saved should be huge.
Despite of saving money, environmentally, shutting unnecessary lights off can efficiently help reduce carbon emissions. Although I am not a big fan of politicalizing global warming, I support any possible green movement to help sustainable development.
Last but not the least, personally, I don’t think that there is any technical difficulty with installing timers to control these public lights. In many other countries, as I know, streetlights could be on and off automatically. Even hiring a group of people to do that manually will still save thousand of hundreds of taxpayers’ money. Shouldn’t we do anything to save money, save energy and save our planet right now?