Local students and business owners share thoughts on lights throughout downtown and campus
By NOAH HARRIS — features@theaggie.org
Daylight savings recently made its biannual appearance into our lives. As we fall back one hour, darkness begins to fall at a much earlier time and lighting becomes more necessary throughout the community.
In January, the city of Davis released a survey for residents offering three options for residents to choose from to light up Downtown Davis.
“[There are] three different lighting options […] to replace the decorative ‘twinkle’ lights that previously adorned trees along downtown sidewalks,” the city of Davis said on their website. “These previous lights historically provided an enhanced downtown ambiance and improved lighting for safety, however were experiencing wear and tear.”
The three options they gave were: a laser unit affixed to the ground projecting small, moving lights toward tree canopies, LED lights strung between installed poles and LED lights strung between trees.
The city of Davis used to have 650 LED lights, which were installed in May 2014. By October of the same year, they were taken out and replaced with warmer lights due to negative resident views. This operation cost 350,000 dollars.
Even though the survey was taken in January, there does not seem to be any progress with this project. However, Brett Lee, the executive director of the Davis Downtown Business Association (DDBA), believes that the city has different plans to install more lighting in Downtown Davis.
“The city is looking at replacing lighting that most people would call decorative lighting,” Lee said. “In Winters or San Francisco, they’ll have decorative lights strung up 20 feet above the street. I think the city plans to do that, which will add to the atmosphere.”
Lee continued by explaining other renovations currently underway in Davis.
“In addition, the G Sreet redesign where there’s sort of a car-free zone, with outdoor dining as part of that project, there’s going to be lighting added,” Lee said. “There’s been a little bit of a delay and I have heard from shopkeepers that they missed that decorative lighting and they’re sort of waiting for the city to replace it.”
Kelsey Meyer, a fourth-year environmental policy and planning and managerial economics double major, decided to conduct a group report on the issue. For her, downtown lighting has not proven to be as big of an issue as it is where she lives.
“I live in North Davis, and I bike to and from campus on Oak Street — it’s a beautiful street during the day,” Meyer said. “But at night, anywhere that’s not on the stretch that’s right next to the high school, it’s almost completely pitch black.”
Meyer wrote a report for a class last year that looked at improving lighting in Davis. Her group proposed three options.
“We looked into retrofitting the current lights with brighter lights, which we decided would help a little bit, but probably wouldn’t be too much of an impact on the current situation,” Meyer said.
The report proposed for Davis to build new adaptive lighting systems across the city. There was already a roadmap for this, according to Meyer.
“As some other cities that had implemented [similar] programs such as San Jose, they actually saved money long-term because of the energy savings from the adaptive lighting,” Meyer said.
The city of Davis is not the only place students have issues with lighting. Tvesa Medh, a third-year psychology and cognitive science double major, and Molly Mac Farland, a fourth-year psychology major, both see lighting as something to improve on the UC Davis campus alongside downtown.
Mac Farland took a University Writing Program (UWP) class at UC Davis and was told to report about something she viewed as an inconvenience.
“I decided I would interview my mutual friend who works at a women’s committee on campus,” Medh said via email in a joint statement with Mac Farland. “[The friend] explained to me that her committee actually has a set aside budget to fund projects like this to increase safety on campus, so we decided to push this project further and try and get more lights installed not only around that building, but other places on campus that aren’t well-lit.”
Dark sky legislation is an important part of this issue. Davis has had a light ordinance since 1998; it was established to minimize the amount of lighting at night, which creates less light pollution and allows for a more visible night sky.
For Meyer, adaptive lighting would not go against this ordinance, though it would mean adding more lampposts.
“A solution like adaptive lighting can help solve that because it’s only [going to] be turned on when it’s needed by travelers,” Meyer said.
As opposed to lights that stay on all night, adaptive lighting would only turn on occasionally. Mac Farland understood the city ordinance but expressed concern about what it meant for students’ safety.
“It’s important for campuses to have plenty of light not only for women but anyone who walks or travels in dark areas,” Mac Farland said. “Especially where there’s a ton of young people who can be considered vulnerable at times.”
Lighting is something that has caused much debate in Davis. The hope for students like Meyer, Lee, Mac Farland and Medh who have concerns on student safety is that ongoing problems will be resolved in a timely manner. Student safety is a community-wide concern as we enter the year’s winter months and experience earlier sunsets and darker nights.
