Blue planet, green ideas | Belgium reduces the lighting of its motorways

Five years ago, while circling the world in the International Space Station, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet had fun photographing the European continent at night, highlighting the particular brightness of Belgium. Having become famous, his photos soon after brought the New York Times qualify the country of Jacques Brel as world champion in light pollution. In addition to highlighting a singularity of Belgian motorways: they are the only ones in Europe which are lit over their entire length, and throughout the night. And the only ones, too, whose layout is recognizable from space!

In a territory as large as the Mauricie, lighting the country’s 1,763 kilometers of highways requires an incredible total of 2.2 million streetlights. In comparison, the Quebec Ministry of Transport counts just under 80,000 on its territory, which is 50 times larger than Belgium.

That hadn’t changed much in 2021, when the astronaut took new photos of the country during his second mission aboard the ISS. It took the explosion of energy costs in Europe, amplified by the war in Ukraine, in the spring of 2022, for people to finally begin to question the need for such intense lighting on motorways.

In the Flemish region, half of the 883 km of motorways have already not been lit at night since 2011. But in the Walloon region, which has 869 km of motorways under its responsibility, it is only since December 15 that off road lights. And again, not too much, not everywhere and not for too long. 12:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. only. In some places, every second light will be on. These changes could generate savings estimated at 300,000 euros (approximately C$435,000) per year.

It’s quite modest. But these are still the first savings resulting from a more ambitious project launched in 2019 in the Walloon region: the Lights 4.0 Plan aims to replace hundreds of thousands of sodium lights with light-emitting diode (LED) lighting systems, over a period of more than 20 years. The annual electricity bill for the motorway network would eventually be reduced by 76%, according to predictions.

The Quebec challenge

This may sound ambitious. It is, in fact, a bit slow if we consider the energy “emergency” gripping the whole of Europe. And even more considering that in Quebec, the Ministère des Transports plans to replace almost 80,000 high-pressure sodium lamp (HPS) or metal halide (MH) lamps in its network, in six years. This is more than three times faster than in the Walloon region.

Launched in November 2021, the program to modernize the provincial road lighting network, with a budget of 190 million, has already enabled the installation of 7,000 new LED luminaires.

You can see them on the Louis-Bisson bridge, between Montreal and Laval, since the end of the repair work, or on Highway 40, in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, and on the Île-aux -Tourtes, at the extreme west of the island of Montreal.

According to the Quebec Ministry of Transport, the modernization of lighting will reduce the electricity bill of the road network by 40%, which amounted to 14.2 million in 2020. Ultimately, the MTQ expects annual savings of $5.4 million, or $4.8 million in electricity costs and $600,000 in avoided maintenance costs.

Obviously, if Quebec illuminated, like Belgium, all of its 4035 km of highways, that would be another story. In Quebec, specifies the MTQ, many criteria are taken into consideration to assess the relevance of installing a lighting system or not, including traffic flows, the type of environment crossed, the presence of vulnerable users (pedestrians, cyclists). In general, the interchanges, the emergency lanes and the convergence zones at the entrances and exits of the motorways, among others, are also lit.

With its Plan Lumières 4.0, Belgium will slowly fade from the European night sky by removing the orange lights of its old sodium street lamps for the white light of its new LED luminaires. Too bad we don’t take advantage of it to reduce the number.