I'm not sure what this has to do with polar bears (are there any in Lancashire?), but this article is merely about shutting off unnecessary street lights on a rural road in the wee hours of the morning when there's likely very little traffic anyway. What's the big deal? I would have thought that Mr. Eugenides would support the government's saving a little money on electricity. Are things so wonderful now that this is all he has to complain about? If so, perhaps it's time to shut down the blog.

You do have headlights on your cars over there, right?

Don't cars have headlights to drive safely in the dark?

I would have thought the majority of rural roads are light free and unlike those B roads, motorways are comparatively straight.

Bloody hell!

I get the Google Reader flash up a new post on this site. I read it, then Eugenides, then I post a comment and Laird has already beaten me to my point.

PS: Why does Samizdata, alone of all the blogs, get truncated postings in Google Reader. Anyone?

Most of the commentators to his post seemed to think he was barking up the wrong tree, though - there's no need for street lighting on rural motorways, and indeed its presence could be regarded as a kind of H&S overkill.

Well all the tree-huggers can go screw themselves. We've done this for decades on the Isle of Man, not because of the polar bears, but to save money.

Maybe councils should get back to basics and do the maths not against doubtful theories about CO2 emissions causing climate change, but more about whether cost saving is worth the additional risks involved and potential lives saved.

Then we come down to the real question, on a cost-benefit analysis how much money has to be saved before it's equal to one life being lost.

Local and Central government have lost this question before it is ever asked as their stupid 'precautionary principle' approach to health and safety demonstrates with such things as Vetting and Barring...

If it saves one child my arse...

Somewhere in the archives of my addled old brain resides the notion that our power stations are very inefficient at powering up and winding down. This is part of the reason that windmills are not very useful, but also means that street lights use up surplus energy at times of low demand that would otherwise go to waste.

Experience has lead me to be careful about believing such received wisdom, however, if this is true it would be an example of authorities pretending to do something useful while actually achieving nothing.

Listen, the point of lights on motorways is that it's more comfortable on the eyes and less tiring to drive when you can see well, and you can also drive for long distances at 100mph at 2am when there is no traffic and you can see well. It's *convenient*. Convenience, especially when it involves driving fast, is anathema to enviro-loonies so anyone suggesting measures like this is, on balance of probability, likely to be the enemy.

Besides, the BBC article specifically mentions CO2.

I think Mr Eugenedies central point is not that turning off the lights is bad per se is bad but that the utterly arbitrary attitudes of our supposed elites. If you are of the Safety Uber Alles persuasion shouldn't you be just as concerned about midnight motorists?

It doesn't make much sense to argue for draconian safety standards in one area and be laisseiz-faire about risk in another area.

I guess it is really just about the Symbolic Nature About the Act. Politics as religion as usual.

With the conker paranoia they get to show the Care About The Children. With the shutting the lights off policy they get to show they Care About the Environment.

All this means they are Good People.

Regarding Google Reader, it isn't Google Reader. It is how the Samizdata RSS feeds data to GR. There are other sites that have truncated articles.
It is one of the reasons I took Samizdata out of my GR setup.
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It would be nice if Samizdata changed their RSS to give full articles, but I don't know enough about RSS to say how that would be done.

Yes, but Cars Are Bad, so in their world the way to increase safety is to make things difficult for drivers. Fewer motorway lights make more accidents? Reduce motorway speed limits -- and that'll save on CO2 as well!

It's not that their attitudes are arbitrary. They are entirely self-consistent but founded on utterly screwed up principles, which makes them hard for us to model.

Yes, it would be great if google reader showed the full articles. Samizdata is blocked for "guns" at my work, so I have some trouble getting the full articles

Well, to be fair they don't make you drive at any speed. Although by creating artificially low thresholds they can certainly exert a great deal of pressure.

Speed limits are a particular bugbear of mine. They are what I like to call "tertiary justice" in that they are several degrees removed from the actual injustice they claim to address.

I had this debate with some police once and their response was "You wouldn't say that if your kid was launched 30ft into a garden!!!". But that's just it of course, everyone agrees that driving like a maniac and running over children is wicked, but that difference between 30mph and 33mph is a very poor heuristic for establishing that.

"Oh I suppose you think you can drive at whatever speed you please!" they retorted. Which I think just about summed up their position.

Speed limits are symptomatic of a government that does not trust the populace. They don't trust us to be able to make personal risk assessments and to act accordingly. They replace actual justice with a crime that is summarily fineable without trial and can be prosecuted on the most arbitrarily obtained evidence.

If speeding was not an offence and instead they had to prove "wanton recklessness" that might actually require some police work and some actual offence to have been committed.

But then they wouldn't be able to send out 3,000,000 demands for payment a year, would they?

Moss

Thanks for response vis RSS. After pressing send I recall that the same thing happens with the Thoas Sewell blog too.

Street lights on rural roads are often more of a hazard than the problem they are 'dealing' with. You drive in darkness with only headlights on and your eyes adjust, then come on a single lamp that destroys your night vision for the next half hour. They are usually only there because some parish council has delusions of grandeur.

Agreed ian - but we are not dealing with a rural road, we are dealing with a motorway.

I was a security guard for 20 years (I wish I was still - I was on more money and got to move about more), and I was sometimes transported to and from sites during these supposedly quiet hours.

There is indeed less traffic on the motorways - but never no traffic.

Turning off the lights is a clear violation of the government's own "health and safety" religion (somehow the sacred edicts do not apply to the government itself).

Road tax, car tax, fuel tax - all these taxes are supposed to mean safe roads to drive upon. Indeed they bring in VASTLY more revenue than the amount of money spent on the roads (including lighting).

This turning off of the lights is not acceptable - no private owner of motorways would act like this. At least not without the people paying him to use the road demanding their money back.

I would be inclined to not complain too much about this (note the use of 70mph suggests reference to the plans to switch off some lighting on the M6, rather than something minor), as The Powers That Be are onlylikely to consider reducing the speed limit when the lights go off.

I also speculate whether the police who patrol this stretch will be issued with image intensifiers; it won't be long before someone with something high-performance decides to take advantage of the darkened wide road to do some performance testing, possibly with their lights off and an image intensifier of their own...