The county council is using Balfour Beatty to upgrade and replace over 50,000 ageing street lights across Cambridgeshire. The current five metre high lamp posts are going to be replaced with six metre ones that are more energy efficient and which shine down rather than out, to be more effective and reduce light pollution and glare. The lights will be white rather than the current sodium yellow.
In order to access government funding to pay for this major overhaul, the county had to agree to removing 10% of its street lights, so not all of the ones taken down will be replaced. Whittlesford will lose six streetlights, for example, but the aim is to carefully site the new lights to reduce the overall impact, such as not putting a lamp post next to a big tree, where possible. The new lights will be put in before the old ones are taken out, and there will be quite a bit of roadworks and pavement digging as the work goes on.
Once installed, the new lights will be dimmed by 40% from 10pm until 6am each night. On traffic routes lights will be replaced by a gold type light and will dim in two stages: 20% between 8pm and midnight, and a further 20% between midnight and 6am.
The local parish councils will be meeting Balfour Beatty and County engineers before the end of October to get a better understanding of what is involved and discuss if anyone wants to add or remove other lamp posts. This is because the parishes also owns some streetlights and pay for the energy used. If you have any questions you can email or ask your parish council who will pass the query on.
More information will be made available after the meeting. Balfour Beatty have a website www.lightingcambridgeshire.com which has information on it as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment