Fake image, we have for example a big natural park called Morvan, it's nearly at the center of France. Some villages are in it but that's it, no big city so there is no reason to see it in yellow in 2014, BS.
(But they decided to improve the light pollution by reducing lighting)
OP actualized the description : black is for place where the lights are of during the night. So 2014 : very few places, 2024 many places. Yellow is just the background. Not "light" (very poor choice of background)
Yes, this map is perfectly accurate. We used to have street lights in every corners of France.
At the top of every mountains, in the heart of every forests, at the bottom of every lakes... All you could see is fucking lampposts everywhere.
We couldn't sleep, we couldn't dream, unable to make the difference between night and day. That's why we were always so pissed as to strike, protest and revolt all the time
Oh, that explains why in Expedition 33 there are street lamps everywhere. I thought they took some creative freedom, but it's just what all of France looks like.
Light pollution has been studied more and more as a major problem for both humans and wildlife.
Bright lights at night disrupt our internal clocks and lead to more cases of insomnia and other issues stemming from disrupted sleep patterns.
Birds and other wild animals suffer from not being able to tell what time it is in highly illuminated areas, disrupting their natural instinctive routines.
I remember when I lived on my university campus and they kept the whole place brightly illuminated with stadium-like lights at all times. It was miserable. I didn’t see a night sky for months. Morning birds were singing at 1am. We had a spider infestation due to the lights attracting insects. It actually led me into a depression and gave me this interest in light pollution and its effects. It was also ridiculous that they were asking us to conserve electricity while basically powering an artificial sun every night.
Wow that’s kind of horrific. I kind of understand the reasoning behind having a university campus well lit at night, but there has to be a bit of compromise there… either way, I hope there is a continued concerted effort going forward to continue to curb light pollution for all our sakes.
What I don’t get about the common “it’s safer” argument is that night sensors are cheaper than keeping the lights on for the whole night. We have the very simple technology to have lights that only turn on when they detect movement. In fact those are even safer because they can alert to the suspicious activity.
But that has to be paired with properly designed lighting that only throws light on the road or pathway and not all around. It is possible to get used to a certain amount of constant street lighting at night, but it is a different story when those lights are suddenly turned on because a car, a pedestrian or even a large animal moves at 1:00 a.m..
Also many lights, including LED lights, wear out faster if they are turned on and off multiple times per at vs if they stay on all night long. I know that for old style fluorescent lights it was about 1 hour, for incandescent light it was about 3-5;minutes; no idea how long it is for LED lights.
In many French villages, the system is not using movement detectors. It is a combination of a traditional photocell to turn on the light in the evening and a timer to turn them off at midnight or 1:00 a.m. "when everyone should be in bed".
Actually in the new park they opened near where I work (in Lille) I noticed the lights are controlled by a movement detector and it works really great.
I find that it lights up just the right distance ahead when I walk through that park, I can see far enough to know where I'm going without problem, but I still notice the rest of the park stays dark, I found it very nice.
It’s not like you can’t have some lights on. Light pollution can be reduced by 85% entirely based on what shade you put on the light. Right now the majority of street lights have no angled shade and send light everywhere. Directing light towards the ground reduces light pollution and still lets areas that need light get them
It’s not even insects “not being able to tell what time it is” — nocturnal insects navigate via moonlight. They are biologically programmed to essentially put the moonlight behind them.
When you see insects buzzing around a light fixture at night, they’re usually stuck in a death-loop. They’ll keep flying in circles until they literally die. While lots of people are adverse to bugs and insects, they play an important role in the food chain — pollinating plants and being food for larger animals.
Wait, that is not normal ? I remember, in the 90's at my parent's extremely urban Paris apartment, I knew it was around 3 AM because the birds in the very well lit avenue's trees were beginning to sing. They shouldn't ? That was all light pollution ?
I’ve lived in a rural home my whole childhood and the majority of birds chirping starts after dawn. At night you’d hear nocturnal birds like owls, but where you have artificial lights that are very bright birds will just wake up at random times which isn’t good for them.
The UK went through this maybe 10+ years ago during the government induced austerity period after the great recession - central government cut council funding to 0. Eventually the councils changed all the lights to LEDs and now most lights are back on.
they are not shut off everywhere, but it's also new lightbulb, and new technology that increase the light intensity before someone even enter a street.
True, but we've had the same phenomenon in the UK over the last 15 years - and it's because local councils can't afford the electricity and maintenance costs, not for any environmental reason. I suspect it's the same in France.
They weren't halogen lamps, we used predominantly SOX and SON lamps. PL/Fluorescent street lighting was also becoming a thing into the 00s, however from 2015-2019, a vast majority of local authorities changed to LEDs and then switched some of them off!
Nuclear plants are expensive but once they’re running, the marginal cost of electricity off peak hours becomes small. Electricity at night in France is cheap (and we even have day/night tariffs).
Cost may be a reason, but the main one is a law by the ministry of ecology, in the environment code, with 2 of the 3 given objective being the light pollution.
It mandates a curfew on light, among other things, like limiting the kind of lampposts that can be installed, and mandating some to be removed when they illuminate more the sky than the street.
It's definitively money. Most of the cities who cut the lights at night did so in the aftermath of the Russian offensive in Ukraine when energy prices exploded.
Now that the prices are back to more reasonable levels, some cities are pondering lighting it up again. But some find the savings rather pleasant and didn't have much of a night life anyway. It allows them to score political points with environmentalists and fiscal conservatives and we have elections coming up in April 2026.
don't worry, nothing change maybe you will heard people saying other thing but that's false, light(in all the city, if it's juste in your house idk) don't reduce crim
The point is still in contention as to whether LED lighting is better for nature compared to sodium lamps.
LEDs are more efficient, and use less energy, but their light is narrowband white light which is very close to, but still not exactly, the same wavelength as sunlight, as sunlight is actually mostly green (the intensity of sunlight washes it out to white in our vision) whereas LEDs output a very strictly balanced white light composed of equal parts green, red, and blue.
For plants and animals, we don't yet quite fully understand what effect less green and more strictly white light has on them, nor humans for that matter.
Furthermore, sodium lamps are actually far, far better in terms of ground based astronomy. Since sodium lamps output a very specific spectrographic signature their light can be easily analysed and removed from astronomical observations, but because LEDs put out a strictly balanced white light, that would mean removing pretty much all light from astronomical observations just to cut out the noise, so to speak.
We have a pretty good idea what it does on most plant families, due to greenhouse/vertical farming industry, which test that stuff pretty heavily. And to a limited extent to the insects those industries use for biological pest control. But you're 100% correct about us not knowing what the effects are on most animals, especially birds and non predatory insects.
And I initially read it as street fighting and thought, “someone talked about fight club”. Disappointed in my tired brain, but at least I got a chuckle out of it.
This doesn't pass the smell test. Gotta be something that is wrong, missing or mis-interpreted here.
There is zero chance that street lights would not be more clustered in either of those images. You can't even clearly tell where Paris is?? Come on....
That's why I am even explaining what lightning means and that it is a very different things to lighting. Lightning is not actually that bad a lighting. It's just for a very short time.
Its not because there are fewer lights, its because they switched to directional led lights which do not scatter as much and thus not so visible from the satellite
We also turn them off at night, usually after 10pm in rural areas and midnight in more populated areas. It’s a recent move that prevents light pollution and also save a lot of energy
Of the 19262 municipalities that could be studied between 2014 and 2024, 11980 appear to practice a total shutdown, 3547 a partial shutdown or a major renovation and 131 have decided to turn on in the middle of the night.The distribution of changes in practice varies depending on the size of the municipality:
More than 50% of municipalities with between 1,000 and 5,000 inhabitants have likely implemented a policy of total shutdown.
36% have done so for municipalities with between 20,000 and 40,000 inhabitants.
23% of municipalities with more than 40,000 inhabitants have done so.
Larger municipalities, on the other hand, have implemented partial shutdowns or large-scale renovations.
source: CEREMA
The Centre for Studies and Expertise on Risks, the Environment, Mobility and Planning (Cerema) is a public administrative establishment
They have an interactive map that shows the year-by-year evolution of municipalities that have reduced their public lighting.
French here, and this shit still is peak retardation to this day.
My mom has to wake up extra extra early to get to work, so she has to walk the streets in pitch darkness, and risk getting shanked or tripping over something at every corner, so you basically have to use a fucking flashlight, while in the middle of a small city.
Makes it feel like you're living in a third world, war torn country, which it basically is, fuck this country.
I love how valid concerns like ours are getting downvoted.
Even as a man, with a car and everything, I don't feel safe coming home at night in pitch darkness.
Like a pedestrian could be in the middle of the road and you'd have no way to see him because the great ecologist minds decided street lamps should be turned off at an arbitrary hour.
The reason streetlamps were invented was precisely to make things safer for everyone at night.
Now it's turned off for the better part of the night. What the fuck is even the point then? Just remove them altogether.
I agree mate, same feeling. When you drive and it rains, it's so stressful with pedestrians. Even as a man, alone in the dark, you can feel unsafe, or just like the other day, i almost broke my ankle in a sidewalk hole.... I understand the ecological aspects, but we could have maybe found a half way like reduced light or a one pole on two being powered on.
I mean socialism always ends there. First basic stuff stops working and you’re walking in pitch dark with a flashlight like it’s normal. Next step is queues for food, and people will still sing about it as “lowering consumption” and “saving the environment."
I don’t get it. Almost the entire nation of France was lit up at night in 2014? Don’t they have rural areas? How do they make all that cheese?
I feel like side by side satellite images would be a better demonstration.
Fake image, we have for example a big natural park called Morvan, it's nearly at the center of France. Some villages are in it but that's it, no big city so there is no reason to see it in yellow in 2014, BS.
(But they decided to improve the light pollution by reducing lighting)
https://darksky.org/news/morvan-regional-park-designated-as-frances-newest-international-dark-sky-reserve/
OP actualized the description : black is for place where the lights are of during the night. So 2014 : very few places, 2024 many places. Yellow is just the background. Not "light" (very poor choice of background)
are these lights on during the day?
No ? We're not barbarian (well we are, but not for that, we ate snail, but we DON'T light during the day)
Yes, this map is perfectly accurate. We used to have street lights in every corners of France.
At the top of every mountains, in the heart of every forests, at the bottom of every lakes... All you could see is fucking lampposts everywhere.
We couldn't sleep, we couldn't dream, unable to make the difference between night and day. That's why we were always so pissed as to strike, protest and revolt all the time
Oh, that explains why in Expedition 33 there are street lamps everywhere. I thought they took some creative freedom, but it's just what all of France looks like.
Villages also have public lighting. The map is apparently by commune, and the vast majority had lighting.
The reason it looks so small is because we have over 40k communes.
Why are they off? Genuinely curious.
To save money, preserve energy, and also as a way of fighting light pollution
Light pollution has been studied more and more as a major problem for both humans and wildlife.
Bright lights at night disrupt our internal clocks and lead to more cases of insomnia and other issues stemming from disrupted sleep patterns.
Birds and other wild animals suffer from not being able to tell what time it is in highly illuminated areas, disrupting their natural instinctive routines.
I remember when I lived on my university campus and they kept the whole place brightly illuminated with stadium-like lights at all times. It was miserable. I didn’t see a night sky for months. Morning birds were singing at 1am. We had a spider infestation due to the lights attracting insects. It actually led me into a depression and gave me this interest in light pollution and its effects. It was also ridiculous that they were asking us to conserve electricity while basically powering an artificial sun every night.
Wow that’s kind of horrific. I kind of understand the reasoning behind having a university campus well lit at night, but there has to be a bit of compromise there… either way, I hope there is a continued concerted effort going forward to continue to curb light pollution for all our sakes.
What I don’t get about the common “it’s safer” argument is that night sensors are cheaper than keeping the lights on for the whole night. We have the very simple technology to have lights that only turn on when they detect movement. In fact those are even safer because they can alert to the suspicious activity.
But that has to be paired with properly designed lighting that only throws light on the road or pathway and not all around. It is possible to get used to a certain amount of constant street lighting at night, but it is a different story when those lights are suddenly turned on because a car, a pedestrian or even a large animal moves at 1:00 a.m..
Also many lights, including LED lights, wear out faster if they are turned on and off multiple times per at vs if they stay on all night long. I know that for old style fluorescent lights it was about 1 hour, for incandescent light it was about 3-5;minutes; no idea how long it is for LED lights.
In many French villages, the system is not using movement detectors. It is a combination of a traditional photocell to turn on the light in the evening and a timer to turn them off at midnight or 1:00 a.m. "when everyone should be in bed".
Actually in the new park they opened near where I work (in Lille) I noticed the lights are controlled by a movement detector and it works really great.
I find that it lights up just the right distance ahead when I walk through that park, I can see far enough to know where I'm going without problem, but I still notice the rest of the park stays dark, I found it very nice.
It’s not like you can’t have some lights on. Light pollution can be reduced by 85% entirely based on what shade you put on the light. Right now the majority of street lights have no angled shade and send light everywhere. Directing light towards the ground reduces light pollution and still lets areas that need light get them
It’s not even insects “not being able to tell what time it is” — nocturnal insects navigate via moonlight. They are biologically programmed to essentially put the moonlight behind them.
When you see insects buzzing around a light fixture at night, they’re usually stuck in a death-loop. They’ll keep flying in circles until they literally die. While lots of people are adverse to bugs and insects, they play an important role in the food chain — pollinating plants and being food for larger animals.
Wait, that is not normal ? I remember, in the 90's at my parent's extremely urban Paris apartment, I knew it was around 3 AM because the birds in the very well lit avenue's trees were beginning to sing. They shouldn't ? That was all light pollution ?
I’ve lived in a rural home my whole childhood and the majority of birds chirping starts after dawn. At night you’d hear nocturnal birds like owls, but where you have artificial lights that are very bright birds will just wake up at random times which isn’t good for them.
That's super nice at first I thought it was the other way around so I was really sad. Now I'm happy.
Those are great goals but if we turn off the lights at night whats the point of the lights? we dont need them during the day
The point is that they're useful between 5pm and 10pm, and between 6am and 8am, but not in the middle of the night.
The UK went through this maybe 10+ years ago during the government induced austerity period after the great recession - central government cut council funding to 0. Eventually the councils changed all the lights to LEDs and now most lights are back on.
It kind of makes sense. At night, everyone sleeps, so we don't need street lights. Let's only use them during daytime.
during daytime we have something called the sun...
You realise there are seasons right? It gets dark quite early in the winter.
so your grand argument are like 2h a day for like 1-2 months a year.... how spectacular....
More like 4 hours a day half of the year Frace is actually quite high up North. Also the hours most of the people drive.
Okay, let's remove street lights at all. Why would we waste money on them if we don't need them during the night and don't need them during the day?
they are not shut off everywhere, but it's also new lightbulb, and new technology that increase the light intensity before someone even enter a street.
they are no longer getting their fuel for cheap
Electricity in France is 99% nuclear and renewables. And since night is the lower demand period, no need to use the gaz turbines anyway.
dont nuclear reactors use nuclear fuel like uranium🤦🏿♂️. are you daft? what were you trying to prove?
Light pollution. It's better for nature
True, but we've had the same phenomenon in the UK over the last 15 years - and it's because local councils can't afford the electricity and maintenance costs, not for any environmental reason. I suspect it's the same in France.
LEDs are dirt cheap once installed. Low energy and long durability
Yes I agree, but most of the street lights in the UK were halogen bulbs.
Not even sodium vapour? That are highly efficient and invented... a literal century ago?
They weren't halogen lamps, we used predominantly SOX and SON lamps. PL/Fluorescent street lighting was also becoming a thing into the 00s, however from 2015-2019, a vast majority of local authorities changed to LEDs and then switched some of them off!
Street Lighting nerd here lol
The blue ones are very harsh tho
No.
The UK and France are way different when it comes to electricity (and its cost), for obvious reasons.
My brother in Christ, 80% of the energy in France comes from their nuclear plants, it’s dirt cheap. You are unbelievably wrong
[deleted]
The energy cost per household of the uk in 2025 is 0.35€/kWh France is 0.27€/kWh
The difference is larger than you imagine, the UK is the third most expensive in Europe while France is 12th.
This is with tax included btw.
Errrrrmmmmm
Nuclear plants are expensive but once they’re running, the marginal cost of electricity off peak hours becomes small. Electricity at night in France is cheap (and we even have day/night tariffs).
Cost may be a reason, but the main one is a law by the ministry of ecology, in the environment code, with 2 of the 3 given objective being the light pollution.
It mandates a curfew on light, among other things, like limiting the kind of lampposts that can be installed, and mandating some to be removed when they illuminate more the sky than the street.
It doesn't really matter why they do it, it's still good.
It's definitively money. Most of the cities who cut the lights at night did so in the aftermath of the Russian offensive in Ukraine when energy prices exploded.
Now that the prices are back to more reasonable levels, some cities are pondering lighting it up again. But some find the savings rather pleasant and didn't have much of a night life anyway. It allows them to score political points with environmentalists and fiscal conservatives and we have elections coming up in April 2026.
And for people
And for crime
don't worry, nothing change maybe you will heard people saying other thing but that's false, light(in all the city, if it's juste in your house idk) don't reduce crim
It does actually
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/france/crime-rate-statistics
That's great
I don't believe those numbers.
Also it's outdated.
I agree, the earth can't possibly be round
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/france/crime-rate-statistics
The crime rates appear to be declining tho
most of the crimes happens during the day... the criminals need to sleep too, and most people arnt in their home
The point is still in contention as to whether LED lighting is better for nature compared to sodium lamps.
LEDs are more efficient, and use less energy, but their light is narrowband white light which is very close to, but still not exactly, the same wavelength as sunlight, as sunlight is actually mostly green (the intensity of sunlight washes it out to white in our vision) whereas LEDs output a very strictly balanced white light composed of equal parts green, red, and blue.
For plants and animals, we don't yet quite fully understand what effect less green and more strictly white light has on them, nor humans for that matter.
Furthermore, sodium lamps are actually far, far better in terms of ground based astronomy. Since sodium lamps output a very specific spectrographic signature their light can be easily analysed and removed from astronomical observations, but because LEDs put out a strictly balanced white light, that would mean removing pretty much all light from astronomical observations just to cut out the noise, so to speak.
We have a pretty good idea what it does on most plant families, due to greenhouse/vertical farming industry, which test that stuff pretty heavily. And to a limited extent to the insects those industries use for biological pest control. But you're 100% correct about us not knowing what the effects are on most animals, especially birds and non predatory insects.
To preserve energy... 🤷♂️
Because it’s 11AM
Less energy, less pollution. Some streets also have detectors which only turn on when there's a car.
save money, support wars
France has a lot of debt
We can afford street lights bro
That's not the reason here.
And, FYI, France has as much debt as Italy.
Reading newspapers does not make one an expert.
Akshually France has the largest total debt in the EU, but 3rd highest debt to GDP behind Greece and Italy.
How the hell does one even make sense of this map? Is there a measure? A legenda? A meaning? Only seems like rotten cheese.
More light on the left, less light on the right.
Yeah. Like if you took a picture of France 10 years ago from space according to this map you'd think it all glow in the dark.
The whole fucking Alps are yellow.
C'mon please.
that could be because of the map resolution. Since the data is probably from a raster. Big pixels = big areas
but i may add that i dont think this map is real or that the data is, i worked in GIS for a french commune on the issue of light pollution
This map is absolutely terrible. This has to be bait
Why do you even need a measure when a light can only be ON or OFF…
A map without a legend is a shit map, period.
They must have terrible storms to have so much street lightning...
Street lightning? Or Greased Lightning?
And I initially read it as street fighting and thought, “someone talked about fight club”. Disappointed in my tired brain, but at least I got a chuckle out of it.
I thought these were different variations of potato chips as I was scrolling through my main feed and saw this pic lol
Sure, the French Alps were fully lit back in 2014 and now we've decided to turn them off. 😬
This is the opposite of map porn. Where are the mods. Map gore would be a more fitting name.
This doesn't pass the smell test. Gotta be something that is wrong, missing or mis-interpreted here.
There is zero chance that street lights would not be more clustered in either of those images. You can't even clearly tell where Paris is?? Come on....
Completely agree with you. This post is setting off my baloney detector.
100% fake map.
This is not how the cities are distributed.
Source ?
"Trust me bro"
first guess they just installed anti light pollution covers instead of straight up turning them off, wth?
it's difficult to draw any conclusions from these maps
OP. I am pretty sure, that you are not talking about "lightning". Lightning happens during a thunder storm.
Maybe OP isn't a native speaker. I also used to confuse the two terms, and to be honest I didn't even notice the misspelling in the title.
That's why I am even explaining what lightning means and that it is a very different things to lighting. Lightning is not actually that bad a lighting. It's just for a very short time.
Good for insects and therefore probably for crops.
Its not because there are fewer lights, its because they switched to directional led lights which do not scatter as much and thus not so visible from the satellite
We also turn them off at night, usually after 10pm in rural areas and midnight in more populated areas. It’s a recent move that prevents light pollution and also save a lot of energy
u/pixel-counter-bot
The image in this post has 131,130(465×282) pixels!
I am a bot. This action was performed automatically.
I was in France months ago And I really thought about how dark it was almost everywhere
Any chance you can post another map of the lightning that happens in the rest of the country and not just street lightning?
Lightning comes with thunder. I suppose this post is about lighting
When you see any kind of map of France and can't figure out where Paris is, then the map is wrong.
French here, and this shit still is peak retardation to this day.
My mom has to wake up extra extra early to get to work, so she has to walk the streets in pitch darkness, and risk getting shanked or tripping over something at every corner, so you basically have to use a fucking flashlight, while in the middle of a small city.
Makes it feel like you're living in a third world, war torn country, which it basically is, fuck this country.
Go on, downvote more, this is a badge of honor
I live in France, everything in the dark at 11pm. Many women are scared to walk alone.
I love how valid concerns like ours are getting downvoted.
Even as a man, with a car and everything, I don't feel safe coming home at night in pitch darkness.
Like a pedestrian could be in the middle of the road and you'd have no way to see him because the great ecologist minds decided street lamps should be turned off at an arbitrary hour.
The reason streetlamps were invented was precisely to make things safer for everyone at night.
Now it's turned off for the better part of the night. What the fuck is even the point then? Just remove them altogether.
I agree mate, same feeling. When you drive and it rains, it's so stressful with pedestrians. Even as a man, alone in the dark, you can feel unsafe, or just like the other day, i almost broke my ankle in a sidewalk hole.... I understand the ecological aspects, but we could have maybe found a half way like reduced light or a one pole on two being powered on.
I mean socialism always ends there. First basic stuff stops working and you’re walking in pitch dark with a flashlight like it’s normal. Next step is queues for food, and people will still sing about it as “lowering consumption” and “saving the environment."
Im sorry. So in 2014 there were a few places with no streetlight, every other centimeter of the countryside was lit up by streetlights?
Blue cheese.
Expensive energy due to Russia/Ukraine. All other answers are a lie
Le depresión de la france
Slowly but surely becoming a third world country. Worst part is that it's self inflicted
Black means more light ?
Less light
I consider this regression.