Installing electroluminescent panels in roads and street signs would eliminate the need to install and operate streetlights on pretty much any road that isn't in a neighborhood or in a downtown area. Which in turn would cut down on some of the light pollution and energy usage that seems to be getting worse.

EL lighting is the same flexible lightsource used in the suites of the modern tron movie. You can purchase it both in wire and panel form from Amazon.

Pairing it with some sort of high strength glass or rubberized coating would render it usable for roads. There is also an EL paint emerging on the market however the long term reliability of it has yet to be proven. I assume the cost of maintenance would be a bit higher but if you eliminate streetlighting you'll be saving significant amounts of electricity as well as replacement costs of bulbs and fixtures. Also considering the fact that modern LED fixtures are full of non replaceable components and rare earth metals, a transition to EL sources would be more environmentally friendly.

Modern HID, Fluorescent and LED light sources take anywhere between 30 and 1000 watts per unit to operate. For instance Jackson Street over by the river. Everyone from battle Creek knows this road. It is lined with a hundred or so streetlights. Each consuming 250 watts. That's roughly 25000 watts of unneeded Street lighting and that is just wattage of bulbs alone. If you factor in ballast heat losses it'd be upwards of 26000 watts. That along with loses from the transmission lines themselves. All that could be replaced with glowing road lines and street signs. That would consume far less power than any streetlight installation.


Even furthur progress could be made with more research into bioluminescent options. If we can safely engineer trees to be bioluminescent (a farely harmless gene modification) then we could entirely phase out streetlighting even in neighborhoods. The amount of ambient light would be enough to see by but not enough to pollute the atmosphere and disrupt natural cycles.

As much as I love lights. I believe a massive paradim shift is a good thing. I don't think LED is the true answer for ALL outdoor lighting. I've already been noticing light pollution rising. It should be something dimmer and more natural. Electroluminescence and bioluminescence fit the bill pretty well.


For anyone worried about security. Camera technology is evolving fairly fast. Low light cameras are pretty good nowadays. And the human eye evolved under moonlight and firelight. Not blindingly glary streetlighting of all technological makeups. Yes that includes INCAN, HID and LED.



Honestly if we could engineer a sustainable combustible fuel gas lighting is another nice "natural", reliable and dim option to look into for major cities. Either that or inner cities could use LED. But the ideal world atleast in my eyes would be lit rather dimly for the sole purpose of getting about efficiently and NOTHING else. We do not need day at night. Fire light to light the major thorough fares, bioluminescent to light the side streets and country side and electroluminescent to light the signs and lines. It'd be a colorful world.

Forgive the scattered and long post. Wrote it at 1 AM lol.

Putting anything into the roads is nonsense. Even the modern road technology is struggling to make them somewhat durable to just serve as a surface for traffic, even if that means the surface cracking all the time. There is no way anything  would survive the rad surface loads and still work.

For "bioluminescent" lighting:Even this will need an energy, in fact a LOT of energy. If in the form of trees, all available is from the photosynthesis. Now the trees are in fact using all their energy to just grow and survive. If you take significant part of that away, the plants will miss that a lot.
So you may make the organisms to glow, but the output would be extremely limited or the organisms wont be able to survive just because of the energy limitations.

Putting anything into the roads is nonsense. Even the modern road technology is struggling to make them somewhat durable to just serve as a surface for traffic, even if that means the surface cracking all the time. There is no way anything  would survive the rad surface loads and still work.

For "bioluminescent" lighting:Even this will need an energy, in fact a LOT of energy. If in the form of trees, all available is from the photosynthesis. Now the trees are in fact using all their energy to just grow and survive. If you take significant part of that away, the plants will miss that a lot.
So you may make the organisms to glow, but the output would be extremely limited or the organisms wont be able to survive just because of the energy limitations.

Roads can be made of plastic, aswell as concrete infused with carbon fiber and or rubber which adds strength and makes the road quieter reducing noise pollution.

Roads made with a mix of recycled tires and concrete are a thing already. Same with carbon fiber. They just aren't wide spread yet.

The bioluminescent tree is a work in progress at the moment. I've read several things online talking about people working on isolating genes to perform such tasks.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/theweek.com/articles-amp/763908/glowinthedark-trees-could-someday-replace-city-street-lights


By the way bioluminescence. Which is a chemical reaction causing the production of light is virtually 100 percent efficient. It produces virtually no waste heat. It can be done entirely by mixing certain chemicals together to produce light. Perhaps it may add an extra energy toll on a tree to make them produce extra chemicals. But plants are resilient organisms.

Roads can be made of plastic, aswell as concrete infused with carbon fiber and or rubber which adds strength and makes the road quieter reducing noise pollution.

Roads made with a mix of recycled tires and concrete are a thing already. Same with carbon fiber. They just aren't wide spread yet.

The bioluminescent tree is a work in progress at the moment. I've read several things online talking about people working on isolating genes to perform such tasks.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/theweek.com/articles-amp/763908/glowinthedark-trees-could-someday-replace-city-street-lights


By the way bioluminescence. Which is a chemical reaction causing the production of light is virtually 100 percent efficient. It produces virtually no waste heat. It can be done entirely by mixing certain chemicals together to produce light. Perhaps it may add an extra energy toll on a tree to make them produce extra chemicals. But plants are resilient organisms.

The bioluminiscence reaction itself maybe, but the tree has to first synthesise those chemicals. And that is, where the energy losses are.  Plus the light has to escape the light generating tissues outside. Another losses. By the way this type of losses is the dominant factor, why LED chips (alone, without the phosphor conversion) do not reach near the 100% efficiency.
For any plant to really be able to process the sun power, it needs a lot of water and nutrients. With the extra energy need for the light generation, it means way more water (which is a problematic thing already).
As a novelty or decoration (so very low power needed) it could be possible, but replacing the power of streetlights is too much.


For the roads: The recycled tyres are making the roads more durable, but that is already part of the technology already in use as road surface alone.
No one ever demonstrated any technology to incorporate anything onto the main road surface in a way it at least approaches the durability of the present roads (half lifetime would qualify), with the road meeting the other requirements as well and with the things inside still functioning.
The thing is, the road surface is flexing under the traffic load, there are not much materials except bitumen (it has a kind of selfhealing properties - cracks tend to seal back; only when excessive this mechanism fails; plus it tends to adhere to virtually anything) combined with rubber (flexible by itself, but no selfhealing property) with some fine gravel (that could be any material) to survive that any long time. Both materials are black (the rubber needs to be actually artificially blackened by adding carbon to prevent the sun UV corrosion).
The thing is these materials have these properties mainly because they are not that much solid, so are not able to protect anything embedded in them (any wire,...; the things like vehicle presence sensing coils need to be embedded in the support concrete structure underneath the surface layer to last at least few years).
You may make plastic able to hold the weight of a heavy truck, but not when the truck is rolling over it 1000's times per day.

That makes sense. Perhaps in the future materials will be produced to solve issues like this.

It'd be nice to one day completely eliminate light pollution.

The best way to do that is find alternatives to bright outdoor lights.

I still feel like electroluminescent lighting would be a good base technology to use for the task... Street signs, guard rails, poles, and other objects could be marked with EL. Making them easier to distinguish without needing lights. There is also the good old fashioned reflector. But it seems like the way to get people to veer away from polluting objects would be to provide a new alternative.

I guess having LED technology at hand (compact with low power, inherently ELV DC and low power, completely immune to any power cycling), more viable seems to me to just turn it ON only when actually needed. In that way at sparsely used paths or roads only very few light sources would be on, majority would be just off, so not causing any pollution at all.

But the key measure, according to me, is to stop with all of the powerful "decorative" lighting (usually designed exactly in the way to shine most of its output to the sky, while bringing no safety function at all) and use the lights ONLY where really needed. That includes ban on all of the bright illuminated outdoor advertisement. That is the first step to be done, it does not cost anything, while reducing very significant part of the pollution. The thing is, today the owners are "racing" with the lights so their property is not the darkest one. If all that would be restricted by laws, no one would be hidden behind others even without such nonsense lighting. This "illumiate everything because of it looks good" is the same as poring pigment chemicals into rivers, "because it is art and it looks good". Dont think anyone would accept the second, yet doing the same with lights seems to be fine with them. Really crazy world.

The second measure would be to use better beam control and use only the power what is needed. So direct the light only where really needed. With present technologies (including HID), this is one of the cheapest methods, yet without any reduction in function and without any extra complexity.

The third is to control the ON time, so light it only when needed. In most of the night it would mean most of tge lights off at most places. Needs more complex infrastructure, but suffice with present light pole installations (uses to be the most expensive part).

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but in chicago they do dye the river green for st. Patrick's day.

Well, that is barbarism. And it shows the hypocrisy of all the "eco" movement: I bet the Chicago town hall would have a ton of "environmental protection based" objections to nearly anything you would like to do there...

At least it is just once per year, so the river has at least some chance to recover. The useless lighting I was talking about uses to be on 365 nights per year...

Something that I feel would help with energy consumption (maybe not light pollution though) is finding a way to make road surfaces be white or a at least more reflective. Have you ever noticed how bright streetlights look on the road after a fresh snow? 100w HPS looks almost as bright as 400w since the snow reflects much more light than black (or gray) asphalt. If we could do that, streetlighting wattages could be reduced significantly.

Something that I feel would help with energy consumption (maybe not light pollution though) is finding a way to make road surfaces be white or a at least more reflective. Have you ever noticed how bright streetlights look on the road after a fresh snow? 100w HPS looks almost as bright as 400w since the snow reflects much more light than black (or gray) asphalt. If we could do that, streetlighting wattages could be reduced significantly.

Hmmm, I'd have to think on that one. The glare you'd get back might be counter-productive. I for one hate driving in snow, and not just because of the poor weather conditions.

...is finding a way to make road surfaces be white or a at least more reflective. .

Well, there is again the problem of available materials which are able to sustain the loading.
The thing here is, the only known flexible/selfhealing materialsare organic and majority (= all, maybe with some exceptions I just do not know now) of organic materials degrade (oxidize) on high light/UV (mainly sunlight) exposure. The only known method to protect them is to make them black, so the radiation is absorbed by just very thin surface layer (which becomes sacrificial then) and so block the bulk of it from the damaging exposure. But that means such material does end up pitch black. Some are inherently black (bitumens), some are artificially "dyed" by e.g. carbon (rubber for car tires,...). In any case, such material wont reflect much of the light.
So the road surface durability requirement is then a factor, which makes (and will likely do so) the roads dark (well, the inorganic filler materials could be reflective, but the resulting reflectivity would never be high).

Plus I dont think bright road surface will make obstacles more visible. Today the strategy is, the obstacles are the thing to become brighter than the dark road, so visible as bright things on dark background, tghis is then the base for the illumination requirement (10lux,...).

Even the most ambitious in-road projects have all totally failed.

There have been LED lighting implanted into roadways in China. Fail.

France put solar panels in a road way. Huge fail.

EL panels absorb water and are immediately destroyed. One thing I learned about working at a DOT in WA State, water WILL find it's way into EVERYTHING given enough time. You absolutely can't put EL panels in a road. The roads would immediately deteriorate and the EL panels would fail soon thereafter. You couldn't spend enough money to build a sturdy enough roadbed to protect the EL panels.

The Chinese idea failed too? Oof.

Maybe one day humans will come up with some miracle material that'll make things like this possible. For now though I guess it is just a dream.

Well that is atleast the imbedded road lighting.

There have been LED lighting implanted into roadways in China. Fail.

There's one road I know of here that has little yellow LEDs built into it down the center line.
I was on it this summer during a thunderstorm where it got dark enough for them to come on. Personally I thought it looked kinda weird .lol.
I had a dashcam running, but they don't show up in the video. (woulda posted a pic if they did)

The Chinese idea failed too? Oof.

Maybe one day humans will come up with some miracle material that'll make things like this possible. For now though I guess it is just a dream.

Well that is atleast the imbedded road lighting.

Honestly, I don't think embedded road lighting is a good idea even if it was viable. It would make pedestrians harder to see depending on conditions and it might make highway hypnosis worse. illuminated road signs seem like they could be a good idea though. It might even be possible to make them solar powered with current technology.