City Council — Regular Session
Proposed by citizen petition. Petitioner: N. Ostrowski, representing 84,000 signatories.
Summary of petition: That the city extinguish all non-essential artificial lighting for a period of 365 days, beginning 1 November, for the stated purpose of restoring natural dark sky conditions and permitting citizens to observe the night sky as it existed prior to electrification. Exemptions: emergency services, hospitals and medical facilities, traffic safety infrastructure, residential interior lighting.
Public comment period: 22 speakers. Summary on file. Notable dissent: Chamber of Commerce (projected commercial revenue loss), Metropolitan Transit Authority (passenger safety concerns), Urban Wildlife Coalition (disruption of adapted nocturnal species). Notable support: Public Health Board (sleep research), the Astronomical Society, 14 neighborhood associations.
Implementation date: 1 November.
Councillor Reyes, dissenting: "This council is voting to extinguish eleven hundred and forty-three streetlights, four thousand two hundred commercial signs, and thirty years of public infrastructure investment on the basis of nostalgia. I would ask the petitioner to tell us what she expects to find in the dark that she cannot find in the light."
Petitioner N. Ostrowski, response: "I don't know."
Dark Year Documentation Project
Six months in.
The data gathered by the Public Health Board and the University's urban studies program is now sufficient to report. Average sleep duration in surveyed households increased by 44 minutes per night in months 1 and 2, declining to 29 minutes above baseline by month 6 as residents adjusted. The city's emergency call volume decreased 8% in the first quarter. Candle and oil lamp sales increased approximately 700% in November, stabilizing at roughly 250% above pre-measure baseline by January.
These are the numbers. They do not tell you what November felt like.
On clear nights, attendance at the two public overlook points increased by more than 3,000%. The parks department extended staffing and installed additional seating after the first weekend, when an estimated 4,000 residents arrived at Prospect Hill with blankets and thermoses and stayed until 2am. Several witnesses reported seeing the Milky Way for the first time in their lives. One woman, approximately 70 years old, sat on a bench at the south overlook for four hours and, when asked by a parks attendant if she needed anything, said she was waiting to see if it moved. The attendant did not know what to tell her. He sat with her for a while.
The acoustic effects were not anticipated in the impact assessment. In the absence of commercial lighting's electromagnetic hum, the city's soundscape changed enough that several residents independently began documenting it. A retired sound engineer in the West Quarter produced an informal map of the city's acoustic landscape. Sounds that had been masked by ambient electrical noise became audible: water in the old stone drainage channels under the commercial district, the particular resonance of the rail bridge two miles south, a high-frequency tone from the power substation on Dyer Street that eleven households had been living beside for years without hearing.
The data does not capture what several social workers in the Eastern Districts have described as a change in the quality of conversation. More people talking to neighbors. More people outside. One social worker, in a note submitted to this project, wrote: "Something is different about the dark. People are saying things they have been meaning to say for years. I do not have a clinical framework for this. I am noting it."
What one finds in the dark does not always have a name in the light.