Crime
If road lighting works as a countermeasure to crime, one theory is that this is because of the improvement to vision. Witnesses are better able to see perpetrators and later identify them. Conventional studies of lighting and crime confound any benefot of improved visibility with that of civic pride, the alternative theory. Here we investigated the influence of ambient light level on crime - the numbers of crimes committed at a given time of day when that period is either in darkness or daylight. UK crime data are not reported with sufficient precision for this analysis, so instead the analysis used data for three cities in the USA. The results suggest that road lighting might be a countermeasure for robbery but not for other types of crime.
Fotios S, Robbins CJ, Farrall S. The effect of lighting on crime counts. Energies 2021; 14: 4099.
The finding from our previous work that a change in ambient light level affected only robbery was tested by extending the analysis from three to eleven cities in the USA, which was all of those available to us. Again, it was only for robbery that a consistent effect of ambient light level was found.
Ongoing work
We are working with the police to acess crime data so that these analyses can be repeated for UK data, and extended to investigate the effect of different lighting conditions.