Mojave Paper & Street Lights

A few weeks back, the Mojave Desert News had an editrol about the number of
OLD ( I.E.not full cut off croba heads ) street lights that where out in
Mojave and Boron ( which is 1/4th the size of Rosamond ). I fired off a
e-mail to the editor ( Signed with name & address ) about how they could :
1. replace the old ones with full cut off croba heads.
2. check the areas and do away with ones that where close to another light
and there by remove some of the cost of the light bill to the city and make
the sky over Mojave just a tiny bit darker, instead of becomeing another
watesfull Los Angeles cess pool of light.

This am I picked up this weeks paper ( it only comes out once a week ) and
in it they have another deal about the lights the S.C.Edison hasn't fixed
yet and that they got an email afrom someone against street lights who is an
astronomer, and in their own way they kind of say screw that yahoo, go out
into the desert someplace else.

When I come back from Lancaster today, I'm going to write and postal mail
them another letter and I'll spell out some facts of life too.

I'll put it this way, Lancaster has almost 200,000 people, Mojave has maybe
2 to 3,000, yet it has almost the same light dome as Lancaster.

www.desertnews.com



--

The Lone Sidewalk Astronomer of Rosamond
Telescope Buyers FAQ
http://home.inreach.com/starlord
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www.sidewalkastronomy.info
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http://www.cafepress.com/astronomy_net
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Blast Off Online Gift Shop
http://www.cafepress.com/starlords

Starlord wrote:

A few weeks back, the Mojave Desert News had an editrol about the number of
OLD ( I.E.not full cut off croba heads ) street lights that where out in
Mojave and Boron ( which is 1/4th the size of Rosamond ). I fired off a
e-mail to the editor ( Signed with name & address ) about how they could :
1. replace the old ones with full cut off croba heads.

Hopefully spelling cobra the right way... otherwise it sounds like you
advocate decapitating streetlamps with crowbars.

2. check the areas and do away with ones that where close to another light
and there by remove some of the cost of the light bill to the city and make
the sky over Mojave just a tiny bit darker, instead of becomeing another
watesfull Los Angeles cess pool of light.

This am I picked up this weeks paper ( it only comes out once a week ) and
in it they have another deal about the lights the S.C.Edison hasn't fixed
yet and that they got an email afrom someone against street lights who is an
astronomer, and in their own way they kind of say screw that yahoo, go out
into the desert someplace else.

When I come back from Lancaster today, I'm going to write and postal mail
them another letter and I'll spell out some facts of life too.

You need to express it clearly in terms of wasted tax dollars lighting
up the sky. You can save money and have the same amount of light on the
ground by using the right fixtures. That might interest the general
populus. Everyone knows astronomers are wierd scary people of the night.

And fear of the dark seems to be an all consuming paranoia these days.
The number of houses with kW class insecurity lamps is getting crazy.

I'll put it this way, Lancaster has almost 200,000 people, Mojave has maybe
2 to 3,000, yet it has almost the same light dome as Lancaster.

That seems surprising.
Is Lancaster particularly good, of Mojave exceptionally bad?

Regards,
Martin Brown

Martin Brown wrote:

You need to express it clearly in terms of wasted tax dollars lighting
up the sky. You can save money and have the same amount of light on the
ground by using the right fixtures. That might interest the general
populus. Everyone knows astronomers are wierd scary people of the night.


But be sure to have a handle on how many tax dollars are actually being
wasted on steetlights before pursuing that argument. Last year, I
looked into the budget numbers for my town of Tempe, Arizona. Our
population amounts to about 200,000 of the 3 million people in the
continuous suburbia of Phoenix.

http://www.tempe.gov/budget/FY%2005-...ine%20Item.pdf

On Page 16 of 418(!) are the electric bill numbers. They show $4.2M,
and $900K of that is for street lighting. The entire City of Tempe
budget is $288M.

So lighting represents roughly 20% of the city's electric bill, and
0.3% of the total budget. Most of the lights are already full-cutoff
in Tempe, so perhaps it's a couple tenths of a percent higher for other
cities without lighting ordinances. You can see why it's a tough sell
to pitch a wholesale change in streetlighting using an argument based
on budget alone. Pitching a proposal to change lighting fixtures to
save a tenth of a percent of a city's budget will likely be quickly
dismissed by the city council, especially when it's weighed against the
cost of the change.

Tom

Starlord wrote:
A few weeks back, the Mojave Desert News had an editrol about the number of
OLD ( I.E.not full cut off croba heads ) street lights that where out in
Mojave and Boron ( which is 1/4th the size of Rosamond ). snip
When I come back from Lancaster today, I'm going to write and postal mail
them another letter and I'll spell out some facts of life too.

The International Darksky Society has an extensive research and
publication section that can provide you with specific facts in aid of
your local community advocacy.
http://www.darksky.org/

The IDS has a number of mini-info papers specifically on city lighting
-
http://www.darksky.org/infoshts/istopic.html#2.04
- and on street lighting -
http://www.darksky.org/infoshts/istopic.html#2.05

For municipal or county advocacy, IMHO the most effective argument is
the economic cost of wasting of energy from light that is dispersed on
areas other than the target of illumination. One IDS mini-paper -
http://www.darksky.org/infoshts/pdf/is026.pdf
- estimates the national economic loss at 1 Billion dollars annually -
or the equivalent of 23 million barrels of oil or six million tons of
coal.

For a positive spin story - see the City of Calgary mini-paper -
city saving $2 million per year by retrofitting 11,000 of its 70,000
street lights.
http://www.darksky.org/infoshts/pdf/is191.pdf

In an environmental conscious culture like California, acid-rain and
CO2 production is probably the second best advocacy hook. Of the 3.9
Billion kwH consumed in the U.S. in 2004, 1.9 Billion kwH was generated
from coal. Only 0.1 B kwH was generated from petroluem. Table 904,
2006 U.S. Statistical Abstract.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/06statab/energy.pdf

The appeal to environmental protection argument would be "Is it ethical
for Californians to ruin the natural vistas in the Grand Canyon by
flooding the canyon with power plant smog just to project light into
outer space?"

Considering the current situation in Iraq, I also feel an appeal to
populist patriotism might also effective even though only a relatively
small percentage of U.S. electric power generation comes from oil.
Although I believe most electric power in California is nuclear,
gas-fired and Utah and Nevada based coal-fired plants - from a national
perspective a moral argument could be made that asking young men to die
in Iraq so that we can project light into outer space is inherently
unethical.

Hope this info helps.

- Canopus56

Mojave has been the "Crossroad" of some of the older highways and a major
railroad area too, they have over the years tried to be like a "Grownup"
city and the city lights show it. For a town of it's size, they have 10
times the amount of light needed.


--

The Lone Sidewalk Astronomer of Rosamond
Telescope Buyers FAQ
http://home.inreach.com/starlord
Sidewalk Astronomy
www.sidewalkastronomy.info
Astronomy Net Online Gift Shop
http://www.cafepress.com/astronomy_net
In Garden Online Gift Shop
http://www.cafepress.com/ingarden
Blast Off Online Gift Shop
http://www.cafepress.com/starlords




"Martin Brown" wrote in message
...
Starlord wrote:

A few weeks back, the Mojave Desert News had an editrol about the number
of OLD ( I.E.not full cut off croba heads ) street lights that where out
in Mojave and Boron ( which is 1/4th the size of Rosamond ). I fired off
a e-mail to the editor ( Signed with name & address ) about how they
could :
1. replace the old ones with full cut off croba heads.

Hopefully spelling cobra the right way... otherwise it sounds like you
advocate decapitating streetlamps with crowbars.

2. check the areas and do away with ones that where close to another
light and there by remove some of the cost of the light bill to the city
and make the sky over Mojave just a tiny bit darker, instead of becomeing
another watesfull Los Angeles cess pool of light.

This am I picked up this weeks paper ( it only comes out once a week )
and in it they have another deal about the lights the S.C.Edison hasn't
fixed yet and that they got an email afrom someone against street lights
who is an astronomer, and in their own way they kind of say screw that
yahoo, go out into the desert someplace else.

When I come back from Lancaster today, I'm going to write and postal mail
them another letter and I'll spell out some facts of life too.

You need to express it clearly in terms of wasted tax dollars lighting up
the sky. You can save money and have the same amount of light on the
ground by using the right fixtures. That might interest the general
populus. Everyone knows astronomers are wierd scary people of the night.

And fear of the dark seems to be an all consuming paranoia these days. The
number of houses with kW class insecurity lamps is getting crazy.

I'll put it this way, Lancaster has almost 200,000 people, Mojave has
maybe 2 to 3,000, yet it has almost the same light dome as Lancaster.

That seems surprising.
Is Lancaster particularly good, of Mojave exceptionally bad?

Regards,
Martin Brown

I'll check out those papers, but I know one thing they'll say, we get our
power from the atomic power plants and also from the wind farms on the hill
sides over looking Mojave ( there's over 1,000 wind turbines on the
hillsides.).


--

The Lone Sidewalk Astronomer of Rosamond
Telescope Buyers FAQ
http://home.inreach.com/starlord
Sidewalk Astronomy
www.sidewalkastronomy.info
Astronomy Net Online Gift Shop
http://www.cafepress.com/astronomy_net
In Garden Online Gift Shop
http://www.cafepress.com/ingarden
Blast Off Online Gift Shop
http://www.cafepress.com/starlords




"canopus56" wrote in message
ups.com...

The International Darksky Society has an extensive research and
publication section that can provide you with specific facts in aid of
your local community advocacy.
http://www.darksky.org/

The IDS has a number of mini-info papers specifically on city lighting
-
http://www.darksky.org/infoshts/istopic.html#2.04
- and on street lighting -
http://www.darksky.org/infoshts/istopic.html#2.05

For municipal or county advocacy, IMHO the most effective argument is
the economic cost of wasting of energy from light that is dispersed on
areas other than the target of illumination. One IDS mini-paper -
http://www.darksky.org/infoshts/pdf/is026.pdf
- estimates the national economic loss at 1 Billion dollars annually -
or the equivalent of 23 million barrels of oil or six million tons of
coal.

For a positive spin story - see the City of Calgary mini-paper -
city saving $2 million per year by retrofitting 11,000 of its 70,000
street lights.
http://www.darksky.org/infoshts/pdf/is191.pdf

In an environmental conscious culture like California, acid-rain and
CO2 production is probably the second best advocacy hook. Of the 3.9
Billion kwH consumed in the U.S. in 2004, 1.9 Billion kwH was generated
from coal. Only 0.1 B kwH was generated from petroluem. Table 904,
2006 U.S. Statistical Abstract.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/06statab/energy.pdf

The appeal to environmental protection argument would be "Is it ethical
for Californians to ruin the natural vistas in the Grand Canyon by
flooding the canyon with power plant smog just to project light into
outer space?"

Considering the current situation in Iraq, I also feel an appeal to
populist patriotism might also effective even though only a relatively
small percentage of U.S. electric power generation comes from oil.
Although I believe most electric power in California is nuclear,
gas-fired and Utah and Nevada based coal-fired plants - from a national
perspective a moral argument could be made that asking young men to die
in Iraq so that we can project light into outer space is inherently
unethical.

Hope this info helps.

- Canopus56

Starlord said:

1. replace the old ones with full cut off croba heads.
2. check the areas and do away with ones that where close to another light
and there by remove some of the cost of the light bill to the city and make
the sky over Mojave just a tiny bit darker, instead of becomeing another
watesfull Los Angeles cess pool of light.

If this is any indication of the e-mail you sent, it's no wonder the
newspaper editor thought you were a crank.

Editors firmly believe in a correlation between spelling and good
grammar and intelligence (whether that opinion is right or wrong,
doesn't matter. That's how they think). If you want your letter to the
editor actually published, then make damn sure that everything is
right.

Of equal importance, is to not rant about the decline of civilization
in general due to something that he would perceive as trivial. To him
and his readers, a little extra light is about as important to the
general scheme of things as gum on the sidewalk. Unsightly, but
certainly not something to get in a twist about. Instead talking about
how city lights are uselessly pointed at the sky and not at the ground
where they'd actually do some good, would be a much better course of
action.

I wouldn't bother with trying the newspaper again though. You've
already lost all credibility with the Editor, and if it's a weekly
small-town paper, it likely doesn't carry any weight with your local
power authority anyway.

Tom Polakis wrote:

Martin Brown wrote:

You need to express it clearly in terms of wasted tax dollars lighting
up the sky. You can save money and have the same amount of light on the
ground by using the right fixtures. That might interest the general
populus. Everyone knows astronomers are wierd scary people of the night.

But be sure to have a handle on how many tax dollars are actually being
wasted on steetlights before pursuing that argument.

It is still the only one that stands a cat in hells chance of working.
Most people these days are quite literally scared of the dark!

So lighting represents roughly 20% of the city's electric bill, and
0.3% of the total budget. Most of the lights are already full-cutoff
in Tempe, so perhaps it's a couple tenths of a percent higher for other
cities without lighting ordinances. You can see why it's a tough sell

It only makes economic sense replacing them at end of life. The cost to
change a streetlamp bulb is so amazingly high that swapping the fixture
at the same time would not be all that much more. And when they are
being replaced far better to use the right fixtures than the wrong ones!

Regards,
Martin Brown