We have looked this up before. If your external windows are overlooking public space and someone's reasonable lighting is partially lighting that space as well, then unless it's obviously excessive it is unlikely there is anything enforceable that can be done, any more than you have an enforceable right to demand council-operated street lighting around your home all be turned off because you don't like it. I'm not even sure there should be anything enforceable that can be done in that situation, but that's just my personal opinion. I'm just pointing out that for lighting under council control, there may be extra steps they can take to moderate the impact anyway.
Why the fuck would a 80 year old be walking down a dark street alone?
I could counter with the obvious "Why shouldn't they, if they want to?" and point out that a member of the previous generation of that family was still happily and capably walking to visit friends or go shopping at nearly 100, but that doesn't really get us anywhere.
In the specific case I had in mind, I'm talking about the oldest member of a family walking back with the rest of his family to their car, after visiting my family.
That person is perfectly capable of getting themselves to the car without needing help from anyone else, as long as they can see where they are going. In fact, as a matter of independence, I'm quite sure they would want to do it themselves. Most people I know of that generation who are still with us take great pride in maintaining that independence as much as possible and not becoming a burden on others, and I firmly believe we should all help them to do so for as long as they can for basic quality-of-life reasons.
Of course their children would help if necessary, and so would anyone from my family, and so would other neighbours if they saw there was a problem. No-one here is suggesting leaving an octogenarian in difficulties to fend for themselves. I'm just saying they shouldn't be put in those difficulties in the first place if it can reasonably be avoided.
Turning off the lights has a disproportionate effect on older people -- not just octogenarian kind of older, but also drivers or cyclists in say their 50s or 60s who would routinely travel independently and probably wouldn't describe themselves as old, but whose eyesight will nevertheless be far less effective in the dark than it was in their twenties. The cut-off point will be different for everyone, but at some point the effect will be enough to make people who would otherwise have felt confident going somewhere not to go out any more, and I don't think that is a good thing.
Many people have expressed their discomfort to their local councillors. In our particular case, we've also already received a mass mail from one of our local councillors making it clear how strongly she objects to these changes and asking for more people to publicly support her campaign to reverse the policy.
You're absolutely right that we should question dogma and look for real evidence before making policy on these sorts of issues. But in this case, other evidence I've seen does support maintaining good street lighting.
Some major UK motoring organisations analysed STATS19 data (the same data used by the study we're talking about here) a few months ago when this issue last became a hot topic. IIRC they found evidence that accident rates that had been falling reassuringly in recent years on various road types had fallen by far less on roads where lighting had been reduced. Again IIRC they found evidence of significant higher fatality rates on unlit roads vs. lit. I think the particular report I'm remembering here was by the AA, though probably some of the other major road safety groups have also produced material on this by now.
But it isn't unnecessary light pollution. If the council have removed the street lighting then your neighbour has reasonable grounds for installing suitable lighting of their own for security, safety and access purposes.
Councils can make whatever argument they want to justify removing lighting for which they are responsible, and all they really have to fear is the next election. However, taking some sort of enforcement action against someone else would be much harder. They'd have to provide actual evidence and cite actual rules instead of just making policy to match their current political goals. Moreover, taking formal legal action in a case like this but then losing because someone beat their argument about lighting in court would be very embarrassing for them, so it seems unlikely that most local councils would really stick their neck out in this way.
In reality, you'd probably be better off just getting a sleep mask and/or thicker curtains if the external light is causing that much of a problem in your particular case.
Just for background, I live in one of the most cycling-friendly cities in the UK, with half a dozen bike shops within easy reach of my home. Everyone in my household cycles, with decades of combined experience. We all have some of the most powerful lights you can buy from those shops on our bikes, often in multiples, and none of the flashing LED stuff for primary lighting. Obviously this is significantly more than a lot of people cycle with (or than the law requires for that matter).
You might have thought you had adequate visibility on your dark country roads, but in reality you certainly had blind spots all over the place. On a mostly empty and level road, with a bit of natural lighting from the moon and stars, you'll get away with that up to a point. But on a poorly maintained city street covered in potholes, debris, painted-on road markings, irregular kerbs and so on, you won't.
Just in case anyone takes your joke seriously, I'm going to point out that the community is just a lot of individuals, and the people I mentioned are typical representative examples of large groups within the community.
When it's 3am it's 3am, no one's paying any attention anywhere.
Which is probably part of the reason that 2-5am is one of the most common windows for serious road accidents despite the relatively low numbers of road users at the time.
That aside, plenty of people are still out at midnight, and plenty more are out by 6am, so if your local authority shuts off the lights between those hours then all of those people will be affected.
If that affects you, you can buy a £5 eye mask to help you sleep, or thicker blinds or curtains for the bedroom windows if you prefer. Presumably you're going to need the same things to cope with all the lights your neighbours buy to replace the missing streetlights anyway, and you're surely going to need them to sleep enough when the nights are short during summer.
Hindsight really has nothing to do with it. If they didn't know for sure what the cause was, there was no need to call it at all. You can mark an issue not reproducible in a bug tracker without actively blaming someone else for a mistake they never made.
Your general point is reasonable. It is also completely undermined by the fact that the police and government do have detailed data available, including the exact locations of all violent crimes they know about, and in many cases also the usage levels of public facilities like roads and paths. And based on that data, they have long advised that sticking to well-lit and well-travelled areas is preferable to isolation in dark areas. This isn't an assumption based on our lizard brains, it's an assumption based on decades of hard data.
If you're in the UK and light pollution from street lighting is affecting your ability to sleep, your local council can probably provide a baffle for the light outside your window that is doing that. There are procedures for these things.
Unfortunately the same procedures will not protect you from a light your neighbour installed rather than the council, nor will they stop that light blinking on and off all night because of the cat chasing its prey near your neighbour's porch.
Unfortunately the original paper has quite severe limitations. The original authors were reasonably honest about noting them, too, but of course as with all too many research papers the media has mostly picked up on the headline and ignored the accompanying notes. I wrote another post earlier with some specific examples, if you're interested.
With the greatest respect, I don't think you quite understand what life is like for an octogenarian. A torch being held in a shaky hand while the other hand holds a walking stick isn't going to help them with slipping down a kerb they didn't realise was right next to them. And slipping down a kerb is a potential fatal event for someone that age.
They probably aren't going to be walking somewhere that has concerns about areas not covered by a lightsource, because they want to be walking where there is plenty of lighting the whole way from the house to the car they're being driven home in.
You don't need to publish a new paper to introduce reasonable doubt about the conclusions of one observational study that contradicts long-standing policy in numerous areas. Just look at the limitations of the paper itself, which is freely available, as are the well-known primary data sets on which it is based.
Unlike most of the media reporting over the past few days, the original authors do acknowledge numerous factors for which they could not or did not control right there on the front page of the paper under "Introduction" and further in an extensive "Limitations" section later on. Some of those limitations are quite fundamental; here are a few things this study didn't or couldn't take into account:
1. The crime data set they were working from did not distinguish between day-time and night-time crimes.
2. The crime data set they were working from did not provide precise location data so it was only analysed within larger areas. Those areas could have had multiple street lighting policies in effect in different locations within them.
3. The STATS19 data set they were working from is primarily about motor traffic and only covers reported incidents. It provides limited insight into the causes of injuries to pedestrians or cyclists unless they directly involved a motor vehicle and resulted in police action. It appears that the study also considered only fatal and serious injury incidents, not minor injury incidents or those causing only damage to property.
4. Neither data set controls for confounding factors, even obvious potential distortions like general improvements to road safety being implemented at the same time. During the periods when lights have been switched off near us, for example, we've also seen speed limits in residential areas widely reduced to 20mph and various safe cycling schemes affecting local road layouts. It is not possible to separate the effects of those different schemes based only on the STATS19 data that appears to have been considered in this study.
5. Both data sets provide only absolute statistics. Neither data set accounts for relative effects like fewer people going out late at night if the lights are off, meaning fewer people to be the victims of certain types of crime or involved in road accidents.
If you genuinely want to know more about this issue, I encourage you to start by reading the original paper. Here it is. Also read some of the opposing commentary by councils that have reversed decisions on this policy after trying it and then seeing their own specific data, and road safety groups like the AA that also analyse STATS19 and other experimental data and have previously reached very different conclusions about the effects of changing street lighting. Many of these sources are also publicly available and yours for the price of a few minutes with your web browser and search engine of choice.
I'm in Cambridge, UK. If you go down to London for the evening to, say, meet friends for dinner or see a show in the West End, then chances are your train home is arriving after midnight. That's when a lot of councils are now turning the lights out. At the 10pm cut-off you're suggesting, even going to play sport a bit after work and then going for drinks or a meal afterwards would have you coming home in darkness.
This is also a university town, and at certain times of year you'll have a lot of foot and cycle traffic between places like university labs and libraries and residential areas. Cycling a whole extra problem of course, because unlike motor vehicles, bike lights are basically worthless for seeing the road ahead and only useful for other people to see the cyclist. So turning off the street lights is pretty hostile to cycle use as well.
Yes, bugs happen, and yes, sometimes diagnosing hardware compatibility issues is tricky. But if I see a potential data loss bug in software I develop, I don't start making judgements about where it comes from -- and I definitely don't start pointing the finger at other people and denying anything is wrong with my own code -- until I've identified the root cause of the problem.
The issue here isn't really that a bug happened, even though the bug was serious. It's the way it was handled that is the greater cause for concern.
A pro-Linux bias on Slashdot is not exactly a surprise, but an equally accurate headline on another forum might have read "Critical bug in Linux corrupts data on SSDs", and the subtitle "Linux maintainers deny serious fault, blame innocent parties for data loss" would probably have been fair too.
Vendors of products affected by bugs in closed source software collaborate all the time. It's usually in their mutual interests, and it has been going on forever. Just look at the extraordinary lengths Microsoft used to go to in order to maintain compatibility of Windows with older applications.
On the other hand, the existence of this issue in the first place, the fact that other vendors whose products may also have been affected did not act as Samsung did, and particularly the denial and active yet unjustified blacklisting of Samsung products by the people running the project with the real fault are indictments of that project, no matter how open it claims to be or how big and famous it is.
This whole affair does not look good for Linux, and more importantly, it does not reflect well on the people currently running development of Linux.
Unfortunately the places where they have been reducing the lighting in the UK recently are mostly either within large residential areas or on motorways. Our rural lanes are mostly unlit anyway, other than locally around junctions or specific places.
It's not just road accidents, either. I have family and friends near where that article is talking about, so I've seen the results directly.
For the younger generations we are seeing some people, particularly females, not wanting to go out late as they'll have to find their way home alone and no longer feel safe. Alternative: Everyone now drives everywhere after dark. Yay for being environmentally friendly.
For older generations, they are actually leaving early even when just visiting friends' homes for the evening, simply because once it's dark they can no longer see well enough to find their way back to the car parked down the street without risking an accident. Alternative: Everyone now installs their own lighting, so all we've done is turn the efficient, relatively cost-effective lighting supplied by councils into less efficient, almost always brighter and/or intermittent, relatively expensive lighting supplied by residents. Yay for... Well, council bean-counters, I suppose, but not really anyone else.
In connection with the latter point, and to the people in this thread arguing that natural moon and star light is sufficient, please remember that older people tend to get much less useful vision from the same light levels as younger people. Just because some people here can see well enough at 25 to walk home across the park by starlight alone, that doesn't mean everyone else can too.
The light suddenly coming on can scare away prowlers who who previous hidden in the dark plus it attracts attention when lights are suddenly switching on and off around a building that is known to be unoccupied.
Unfortunately, the also attract attention when they are suddenly switching on and off around buildings that are occupied, and they do it whether it's a criminal triggering them or just someone walking home late or a neighbour's pet cat.
We've recently had a bunch of work done on the streetlights around us, leaving it completely dark right outside our own home. It looks like several people have almost immediately installed their own lighting at their own expense to compensate (which gives you some idea of how popular this move really is, I guess). We could try charging admission for the flashing light show we now get some nights, but honestly, we'd rather be able to sleep again.
Unfortunately, those headlights also tend to be aimed at the road ahead and maybe a little ground just to the side of it. They offer little visibility into junctions or corners. A few modern vehicles do have dedicated cornering lights, but even those provide nowhere near the visibility into where you'll be going next that street lighting does.
Since we're not citing studies we remember, I remember one from just a few years ago that suggested the most cost-effective single measure we could take to save lives on our roads in the UK might be to fully light every mile of motorway (and possibly all high-speed roads, but I can't remember now whether the data supported going that far).
The reasoning was that a) most people are afraid of the dark and b) a ne'er-do-well would need a flashlight, which would be easy to spot in the darkness.
But only if there is a chance of people passing by, which seems less likely if the surrounding area is also in complete darkness at the time.
This is indeed good news for amateur astronomers. Unfortunately, they are among the only people who will actually benefit or want to go out at night under these conditions.
My wife and sister, in contrast, are now uncomfortable about things like getting a late train home and then walking back from the station in pitch black conditions, to the point where if they can't make arrangements for more secure travel either end of a journey then they will sometimes not go out at all. And yes, before anyone asks, there have actually been relevant crimes recorded in the relevant areas, so their concerns do have have some justification. There is a reason that police and public safety advisors have long recommended walking home along well-lit streets instead of dark paths late at night.
While we're at it, several sources have already highlighted other data, up to and including coroners' reports directly attributing actual deaths in road traffic collisions to reduced lighting, that conflict with the claims here of no harm being done. Those claims are also in conflict with more general evidence about how to design homes and wider areas to minimise the ability for criminals to approach targets undetected and the reduced crime rates that result.
In short, this seems to be based on one selective result, published in a relatively obscure journal and from a relatively unknown source that has some unspecified link to UCL for credibility, that directly contradicts established policing policy, public safety policy, road safety policy, architectural principles, common sense, and hard evidence. But yay for astronomers though, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
We have looked this up before. If your external windows are overlooking public space and someone's reasonable lighting is partially lighting that space as well, then unless it's obviously excessive it is unlikely there is anything enforceable that can be done, any more than you have an enforceable right to demand council-operated street lighting around your home all be turned off because you don't like it. I'm not even sure there should be anything enforceable that can be done in that situation, but that's just my personal opinion. I'm just pointing out that for lighting under council control, there may be extra steps they can take to moderate the impact anyway.
Why the fuck would a 80 year old be walking down a dark street alone?
I could counter with the obvious "Why shouldn't they, if they want to?" and point out that a member of the previous generation of that family was still happily and capably walking to visit friends or go shopping at nearly 100, but that doesn't really get us anywhere.
In the specific case I had in mind, I'm talking about the oldest member of a family walking back with the rest of his family to their car, after visiting my family.
That person is perfectly capable of getting themselves to the car without needing help from anyone else, as long as they can see where they are going. In fact, as a matter of independence, I'm quite sure they would want to do it themselves. Most people I know of that generation who are still with us take great pride in maintaining that independence as much as possible and not becoming a burden on others, and I firmly believe we should all help them to do so for as long as they can for basic quality-of-life reasons.
Of course their children would help if necessary, and so would anyone from my family, and so would other neighbours if they saw there was a problem. No-one here is suggesting leaving an octogenarian in difficulties to fend for themselves. I'm just saying they shouldn't be put in those difficulties in the first place if it can reasonably be avoided.
Turning off the lights has a disproportionate effect on older people -- not just octogenarian kind of older, but also drivers or cyclists in say their 50s or 60s who would routinely travel independently and probably wouldn't describe themselves as old, but whose eyesight will nevertheless be far less effective in the dark than it was in their twenties. The cut-off point will be different for everyone, but at some point the effect will be enough to make people who would otherwise have felt confident going somewhere not to go out any more, and I don't think that is a good thing.
That's just how we Brits roll, my friend.
Many people have expressed their discomfort to their local councillors. In our particular case, we've also already received a mass mail from one of our local councillors making it clear how strongly she objects to these changes and asking for more people to publicly support her campaign to reverse the policy.
You're absolutely right that we should question dogma and look for real evidence before making policy on these sorts of issues. But in this case, other evidence I've seen does support maintaining good street lighting.
Some major UK motoring organisations analysed STATS19 data (the same data used by the study we're talking about here) a few months ago when this issue last became a hot topic. IIRC they found evidence that accident rates that had been falling reassuringly in recent years on various road types had fallen by far less on roads where lighting had been reduced. Again IIRC they found evidence of significant higher fatality rates on unlit roads vs. lit. I think the particular report I'm remembering here was by the AA, though probably some of the other major road safety groups have also produced material on this by now.
But it isn't unnecessary light pollution. If the council have removed the street lighting then your neighbour has reasonable grounds for installing suitable lighting of their own for security, safety and access purposes.
Councils can make whatever argument they want to justify removing lighting for which they are responsible, and all they really have to fear is the next election. However, taking some sort of enforcement action against someone else would be much harder. They'd have to provide actual evidence and cite actual rules instead of just making policy to match their current political goals. Moreover, taking formal legal action in a case like this but then losing because someone beat their argument about lighting in court would be very embarrassing for them, so it seems unlikely that most local councils would really stick their neck out in this way.
In reality, you'd probably be better off just getting a sleep mask and/or thicker curtains if the external light is causing that much of a problem in your particular case.
Sorry, but I completely disagree.
Just for background, I live in one of the most cycling-friendly cities in the UK, with half a dozen bike shops within easy reach of my home. Everyone in my household cycles, with decades of combined experience. We all have some of the most powerful lights you can buy from those shops on our bikes, often in multiples, and none of the flashing LED stuff for primary lighting. Obviously this is significantly more than a lot of people cycle with (or than the law requires for that matter).
You might have thought you had adequate visibility on your dark country roads, but in reality you certainly had blind spots all over the place. On a mostly empty and level road, with a bit of natural lighting from the moon and stars, you'll get away with that up to a point. But on a poorly maintained city street covered in potholes, debris, painted-on road markings, irregular kerbs and so on, you won't.
Just in case anyone takes your joke seriously, I'm going to point out that the community is just a lot of individuals, and the people I mentioned are typical representative examples of large groups within the community.
When it's 3am it's 3am, no one's paying any attention anywhere.
Which is probably part of the reason that 2-5am is one of the most common windows for serious road accidents despite the relatively low numbers of road users at the time.
That aside, plenty of people are still out at midnight, and plenty more are out by 6am, so if your local authority shuts off the lights between those hours then all of those people will be affected.
If that affects you, you can buy a £5 eye mask to help you sleep, or thicker blinds or curtains for the bedroom windows if you prefer. Presumably you're going to need the same things to cope with all the lights your neighbours buy to replace the missing streetlights anyway, and you're surely going to need them to sleep enough when the nights are short during summer.
Hindsight really has nothing to do with it. If they didn't know for sure what the cause was, there was no need to call it at all. You can mark an issue not reproducible in a bug tracker without actively blaming someone else for a mistake they never made.
Your general point is reasonable. It is also completely undermined by the fact that the police and government do have detailed data available, including the exact locations of all violent crimes they know about, and in many cases also the usage levels of public facilities like roads and paths. And based on that data, they have long advised that sticking to well-lit and well-travelled areas is preferable to isolation in dark areas. This isn't an assumption based on our lizard brains, it's an assumption based on decades of hard data.
If you're in the UK and light pollution from street lighting is affecting your ability to sleep, your local council can probably provide a baffle for the light outside your window that is doing that. There are procedures for these things.
Unfortunately the same procedures will not protect you from a light your neighbour installed rather than the council, nor will they stop that light blinking on and off all night because of the cat chasing its prey near your neighbour's porch.
Unfortunately the original paper has quite severe limitations. The original authors were reasonably honest about noting them, too, but of course as with all too many research papers the media has mostly picked up on the headline and ignored the accompanying notes. I wrote another post earlier with some specific examples, if you're interested.
With the greatest respect, I don't think you quite understand what life is like for an octogenarian. A torch being held in a shaky hand while the other hand holds a walking stick isn't going to help them with slipping down a kerb they didn't realise was right next to them. And slipping down a kerb is a potential fatal event for someone that age.
They probably aren't going to be walking somewhere that has concerns about areas not covered by a lightsource, because they want to be walking where there is plenty of lighting the whole way from the house to the car they're being driven home in.
You don't need to publish a new paper to introduce reasonable doubt about the conclusions of one observational study that contradicts long-standing policy in numerous areas. Just look at the limitations of the paper itself, which is freely available, as are the well-known primary data sets on which it is based.
Unlike most of the media reporting over the past few days, the original authors do acknowledge numerous factors for which they could not or did not control right there on the front page of the paper under "Introduction" and further in an extensive "Limitations" section later on. Some of those limitations are quite fundamental; here are a few things this study didn't or couldn't take into account:
1. The crime data set they were working from did not distinguish between day-time and night-time crimes.
2. The crime data set they were working from did not provide precise location data so it was only analysed within larger areas. Those areas could have had multiple street lighting policies in effect in different locations within them.
3. The STATS19 data set they were working from is primarily about motor traffic and only covers reported incidents. It provides limited insight into the causes of injuries to pedestrians or cyclists unless they directly involved a motor vehicle and resulted in police action. It appears that the study also considered only fatal and serious injury incidents, not minor injury incidents or those causing only damage to property.
4. Neither data set controls for confounding factors, even obvious potential distortions like general improvements to road safety being implemented at the same time. During the periods when lights have been switched off near us, for example, we've also seen speed limits in residential areas widely reduced to 20mph and various safe cycling schemes affecting local road layouts. It is not possible to separate the effects of those different schemes based only on the STATS19 data that appears to have been considered in this study.
5. Both data sets provide only absolute statistics. Neither data set accounts for relative effects like fewer people going out late at night if the lights are off, meaning fewer people to be the victims of certain types of crime or involved in road accidents.
If you genuinely want to know more about this issue, I encourage you to start by reading the original paper. Here it is. Also read some of the opposing commentary by councils that have reversed decisions on this policy after trying it and then seeing their own specific data, and road safety groups like the AA that also analyse STATS19 and other experimental data and have previously reached very different conclusions about the effects of changing street lighting. Many of these sources are also publicly available and yours for the price of a few minutes with your web browser and search engine of choice.
I'm in Cambridge, UK. If you go down to London for the evening to, say, meet friends for dinner or see a show in the West End, then chances are your train home is arriving after midnight. That's when a lot of councils are now turning the lights out. At the 10pm cut-off you're suggesting, even going to play sport a bit after work and then going for drinks or a meal afterwards would have you coming home in darkness.
This is also a university town, and at certain times of year you'll have a lot of foot and cycle traffic between places like university labs and libraries and residential areas. Cycling a whole extra problem of course, because unlike motor vehicles, bike lights are basically worthless for seeing the road ahead and only useful for other people to see the cyclist. So turning off the street lights is pretty hostile to cycle use as well.
Yes, bugs happen, and yes, sometimes diagnosing hardware compatibility issues is tricky. But if I see a potential data loss bug in software I develop, I don't start making judgements about where it comes from -- and I definitely don't start pointing the finger at other people and denying anything is wrong with my own code -- until I've identified the root cause of the problem.
The issue here isn't really that a bug happened, even though the bug was serious. It's the way it was handled that is the greater cause for concern.
A pro-Linux bias on Slashdot is not exactly a surprise, but an equally accurate headline on another forum might have read "Critical bug in Linux corrupts data on SSDs", and the subtitle "Linux maintainers deny serious fault, blame innocent parties for data loss" would probably have been fair too.
Is that really the point, though?
Vendors of products affected by bugs in closed source software collaborate all the time. It's usually in their mutual interests, and it has been going on forever. Just look at the extraordinary lengths Microsoft used to go to in order to maintain compatibility of Windows with older applications.
On the other hand, the existence of this issue in the first place, the fact that other vendors whose products may also have been affected did not act as Samsung did, and particularly the denial and active yet unjustified blacklisting of Samsung products by the people running the project with the real fault are indictments of that project, no matter how open it claims to be or how big and famous it is.
This whole affair does not look good for Linux, and more importantly, it does not reflect well on the people currently running development of Linux.
Unfortunately the places where they have been reducing the lighting in the UK recently are mostly either within large residential areas or on motorways. Our rural lanes are mostly unlit anyway, other than locally around junctions or specific places.
It's not just road accidents, either. I have family and friends near where that article is talking about, so I've seen the results directly.
For the younger generations we are seeing some people, particularly females, not wanting to go out late as they'll have to find their way home alone and no longer feel safe. Alternative: Everyone now drives everywhere after dark. Yay for being environmentally friendly.
For older generations, they are actually leaving early even when just visiting friends' homes for the evening, simply because once it's dark they can no longer see well enough to find their way back to the car parked down the street without risking an accident. Alternative: Everyone now installs their own lighting, so all we've done is turn the efficient, relatively cost-effective lighting supplied by councils into less efficient, almost always brighter and/or intermittent, relatively expensive lighting supplied by residents. Yay for... Well, council bean-counters, I suppose, but not really anyone else.
In connection with the latter point, and to the people in this thread arguing that natural moon and star light is sufficient, please remember that older people tend to get much less useful vision from the same light levels as younger people. Just because some people here can see well enough at 25 to walk home across the park by starlight alone, that doesn't mean everyone else can too.
The light suddenly coming on can scare away prowlers who who previous hidden in the dark plus it attracts attention when lights are suddenly switching on and off around a building that is known to be unoccupied.
Unfortunately, the also attract attention when they are suddenly switching on and off around buildings that are occupied, and they do it whether it's a criminal triggering them or just someone walking home late or a neighbour's pet cat.
We've recently had a bunch of work done on the streetlights around us, leaving it completely dark right outside our own home. It looks like several people have almost immediately installed their own lighting at their own expense to compensate (which gives you some idea of how popular this move really is, I guess). We could try charging admission for the flashing light show we now get some nights, but honestly, we'd rather be able to sleep again.
And cars tend to have headlights.
Unfortunately, those headlights also tend to be aimed at the road ahead and maybe a little ground just to the side of it. They offer little visibility into junctions or corners. A few modern vehicles do have dedicated cornering lights, but even those provide nowhere near the visibility into where you'll be going next that street lighting does.
Since we're not citing studies we remember, I remember one from just a few years ago that suggested the most cost-effective single measure we could take to save lives on our roads in the UK might be to fully light every mile of motorway (and possibly all high-speed roads, but I can't remember now whether the data supported going that far).
The reasoning was that a) most people are afraid of the dark and b) a ne'er-do-well would need a flashlight, which would be easy to spot in the darkness.
But only if there is a chance of people passing by, which seems less likely if the surrounding area is also in complete darkness at the time.
This is indeed good news for amateur astronomers. Unfortunately, they are among the only people who will actually benefit or want to go out at night under these conditions.
My wife and sister, in contrast, are now uncomfortable about things like getting a late train home and then walking back from the station in pitch black conditions, to the point where if they can't make arrangements for more secure travel either end of a journey then they will sometimes not go out at all. And yes, before anyone asks, there have actually been relevant crimes recorded in the relevant areas, so their concerns do have have some justification. There is a reason that police and public safety advisors have long recommended walking home along well-lit streets instead of dark paths late at night.
While we're at it, several sources have already highlighted other data, up to and including coroners' reports directly attributing actual deaths in road traffic collisions to reduced lighting, that conflict with the claims here of no harm being done. Those claims are also in conflict with more general evidence about how to design homes and wider areas to minimise the ability for criminals to approach targets undetected and the reduced crime rates that result.
In short, this seems to be based on one selective result, published in a relatively obscure journal and from a relatively unknown source that has some unspecified link to UCL for credibility, that directly contradicts established policing policy, public safety policy, road safety policy, architectural principles, common sense, and hard evidence. But yay for astronomers though, I guess.