http://www.admiral.com/newsArticles/4771/Motorway-lighting-switch-off-to-take-effect

Lighting on lengths of the M58, M65, and M66 are to be permanently switched off.

The M65 has already had this work done, and the lack of lighting poses no problem.

However, the deficiencies of lining and road stud maintenance are now very clear - the motorway needs a rapid programme of stud replacement and new road markings as they are badly worn on the entire length.

The same undoubtedly applies to the M58 and M66.

Thoughts?

Interesting, I have a feeling that this will see the removal of lighting from some stretches. If memory serves, some of these stretches-despite having retrofitted lamps of the SON variety have older type columns????

Maybe they will be removed over time? The M58 I dont really see much point in lighting, apart from the slips around Skem and maybe the last half mile before the M6.

Maybe they are having the German Autobahn approach? a HUGE network with barely a few tiny stretches lit????

I personally think motorway lighting is needed on busier and "tight junctioned" sections of the network (mid section M53, start of the M56 and all of the M60 for example). Wider and more rural sections possibly need reviewing. Fair enough!

I can recall when much of this lighting was installed, for example on the southern M1 it was done in the 1980s, and there was much that appeared in both the technical and mainstream press about how the accident rate at night had been reduced. Note this was at a time when there was much less overnight motorway traffic than is now the case.

I noticed last week on the M1, of all routes, that there are signs up for a major switch-off around Northampton. Has it become the fashionable thing to do to ensure your career progression ? Is it good to say "turned off all the motorway lighting in my patch" on your CV ?

I wonder, where are the figures for accident rate, long term, after the switch-off ? How could installing lighting be found to be the better option in 1980, and now removing it is the better option in 2010 ? If the figures really do not change, where is the analysis about why it was found that there was a reduction in the rate when it was first put in ?

Hmm, that will mean effectively all of the M66 being unlit, as it's currently unlit north of J1.

It's in dense fog where I find the lighting most useful. I don't know if it's an illusion or what, but I find I don't have to squint at the road half so hard in a lit area - the headlight beam doesn't seem to reflect back so much.
Perhaps there isn't as much fog around now as there was in 1980!

I know a man with an Ecodyn machine to measure the reflectivity of the markings... and another man with a team of whitelining machines and studding trucks... my fee is quite reasonable

This is a very difficult analysis to perform. Basically you are looking to potential confounding factors, but one you identify them proving which (if any) are responsible for the paradox in effectively impossible.

Most likely the reason is that external environment has changed. Vehicles are much safer and have better lights than was the norm in the 1980s, so it would be very unlikely that switching lights off would show the reversal of any original results.

It is also likely that the reductions seen when lighting was introduced, were not entirely due to the new lighting but included a contribution from external confounding factors like regression to the mean, and more importantly the increasingly rapid safety improvements in vehicles and highways that occurred at the time.

A more remote possibility is that the loss of lighting has in fact increased casualties, but that this has been offset by some other factor reducing casualties at the same time.

With road safety typically involving interventions on multiple fronts at the same time, it is very difficult to separate out any individual intervention and accurately assess it's impact - which is why you see so many valid challenges to the claims made to support some of the, shall we say, less popular interventions.

It's funny really. They insist on upgrading all the lighting from SOX to SON and then can't pay the electricity bill. Whilst I totally understand why SOX is not seen as desirable in urban areas, residential areas especially, I see no issue whatsoever with it on motorways.

As others have said, I think motorways should not be lit outside of urban areas, unless there is a situation, such as a complex junction. I'd sooner invest in cats eyes and barrier reflectors.

Also, when a lit section turns into an unlit section, the lighting should start to drop on approach to the dark part, through increased post spacing and perhaps bulb wattage. A lot of people hate the darkness on motorways because they're often plunged suddenly into it and their eyes take a moment or two to adjust to it.

This is why I thought Italian autostrade had the very worst possible type of lighting - they were all unlit, except at junctions, where lighting would be provided for merges only. Every single junction had lights for the duration of the merge space. So at every junction you'd have a sudden rush of bliding light, just long enough for your eyes to start to adjust, before being plunged back into darkness again. Horrendous - I can't imagine why it's thought to be a good idea!

I see no problem in lighting junctions but other than that, I really don't see the need for many motorways to be lit. We see more rural sections lit today than ever before and now, unsurprisingly, the electricity bills are becoming too high. To this day I don't understand why the M62 across Saddleworth is lit – about the best example I can think of.

There's no point in switching off the old SOX units on the M53 – given the fact that very few of them actually work anyway… I'd imagine the electricity bills along the Ellesmere Port stretch would be next to nothing!

Cat's eyes and replacement road markings would be the way forward. Not a motorway admittedly, but a few lengthy sections of the A41 around Newport had some new cat's eyes fitted about 18 months ago. It's largely unlit and the cat's eyes on these stretches are more than adequate at night. A lot of money could be saved here in terms of electric in the long run, if the authorities are willing to swallow the initial outlay.

I can't comment on what it would do as regards to safety.

The HA doesn't have an electricity meter on its motorway lighting - highway authorities (councils included) pay for electricity based on the number and type of lamps they have. So the HA will be paying for electricity for all its lights whether they work or not.

Some of the sections of M65 and M66 that are having their lights turned off are quite urban, of course. The stretch of M66 that runs through the council estate east of Bury town centre will seem quite strange with no lights.

Although I find driving in the dark to be preferable to driving under streetlighting, I did notice that when I was working nights (driving about 300 miles) that I was most likely to start feeling drowsy when on the M54 between Wolverhampton and Telford (no lighting on that), than when I was on the lit M6 only quarter an hour or so before. It may have been coincidence and it may have been that there was far less traffic on the M54 at approx 4.30AM than on the M6.

The M5 Northern Worcestershire stretch is also dark now from midnight to 5am. The Lickey Hills can often yield fog, the road climbs about 300 feet from the floor of the Severn Valley to Frankley so the weather often changes drastically within a few miles. Let's see how many prangs we get.

I take it the lighting is just being switched off rather than removed. I suppose the advantage there is that if there was an accident or roadworks the lighting could be switched back on. However, this will mean it will still need to be maintained (and obviously this will be patchy as it will be very low priority).

Another potential problem I have thought of is that the remaining columns will be unlit. It could be rather dangerous to have a large metal object in total darkness just metres away from the motorway. Therefore I think the bases should be painted bright yellow just to make them more visible to motorists.

I'm not sure I'd be too happy driving at night with the reflection of a bright yellow blob whizzing past my right eye at 70mph every few feet. Surely the crash barrier would suffice?

Is it any different to bridges or the huge pillars for a switched-off VMS? There's a crash barrier between you and the columns; there's a white line and reflective studs to mark the edge of the carriageway; if you veer off the road you're going to hit whatever is there regardless of what colour it's painted. I don't see how this would help.

A lot of columns aren't protected - but still, if you're going off the road you're going to hit something, perhaps better you hit a column than get kebabbed on the wooden boundary fence...

On the M2 J3-4 section theyve left lit the A229 overbridge as it had under-deck lighting and the foundations and pillars are very close to the live carriageway. Also the columns are largely mounted in the very wide central reservation and there is a lot of light overspill in the surrounding areas

Not to state the obvious, but if you're driving towards a large metal object on the roadside, its likely you're not doing it by choice, and therefore what purpose would a blob of paint serve?