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comment A Model Ordinance Seeks to Put Lighting in its Place
Too much light, light in the wrong place, shining in the wrong direction: the sheer waste of letting light go where it isn’t needed or wanted is increasingly unacceptable. “We have to get lighting systems where the preponderance of light is actually used,” says lighting designer James Benya.
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Benya is one of the volunteers who served on a joint task force of the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) and the Illumination Engineering Society of North America (IES), which in February 2009 released a draft of a model lighting ordinance (MLO), which is available for comment until April 10, 2009. More than 2,000 localities have adopted lighting regulations, most of which were written by non-experts. Many are unenforceable, so lax as to be useless, or even use nonexistent units to specify lighting limits. IDA, IES, and many communities saw a need for a technically astute ordinance adaptable to municipalities of any size and composition.
The ordinance follows the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) in using a system of zones, designating areas ranging from completely unlit to areas where a high level of illumination is acceptable. The ordinance makes clear rules for each zone, but because a given locality can decide what areas to place in which zones, or even whether to make use of all the zones, it has great flexibility.
The task force developed the “BUG” method to assess light fixtures based on lumens emitted as backlight, uplight and glare, measuring how much light goes where it shouldn’t. Since even the best fixtures produce some light pollution due to surface reflectance upwards, the ordinance limits total lumens per site, the surest way to reduce light pollution. The performance-based option for non-residential and multi-unit residential properties uses software commonly used by lighting designers and engineers and takes advantage of new methods for predicting skyglow contribution and glare. While regulating lighting at all can get some people up in arms, Benya points out that the ordinance’s approach follows customary ideas of property rights in that it allows people to do as they please—up to the point where their lighting imposes on others.
Benya says the goal of the ordinance is simply to prevent bad lighting. “Good practice is still the designer’s problem,” he says.
“This is going to change outdoor lighting in huge ways,” Benya says. “There are a lot of products that are going to disappear, and others that will be developed.” But while the design of luminaires is important, Benya says, the more fundamental point is to question whether light is needed in a given place at all.
The U.S. Green Building Council’s (USGBC) LEED rating system offers a credit for reducing light pollution, but both Benya and Pete Strasser, managing director of the International Dark-Sky Association, take USGBC to task for the credit’s complexity. Strasser says that under LEED v2.0, 45 percent of registered projects sought a point for light pollution reduction, but under the much more complex v2.2 requirements, less than 10 percent seek the point. According to Benya, the ordinance is intended to be usable by “anyone who can read and speak English.”
Strasser regrets that in LEED, addressing light pollution is an option instead of a prerequisite. “From a public conspicuity standpoint, this is a disaster. The public does not look at a building and marvel at the more efficient compressor or better insulation, but boy do they notice bad lighting,” he says. “A Platinum-level building can have searchlights and open flames for lighting and still get the certification.”
According to Benya, USGBC is well aware that it has struggled to cope effectively with light pollution, and is very likely to adapt the ordinance—once it has received comments and assumed its final form—for use in LEED. Brendan Owens, vice president for LEED technical development, is more guarded, but says the ordinance “is exactly the type of market innovation LEED can draw on to make it a more effective market transformation tool.”
The IDA-IESNA Model Lighting Ordinance can be found at www.darksky.org.
This article originally appeared on BuildingGreen.com
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