Regulations of Catalonia Law (fw) (and the Czech draft)

[Jan Hollan <jhollan@amper....muni.cz>]

Dear night-environmentalists,

on the Catalan list (celfosc, at yahoo too), I've noticed an URL of the
public version of the draft of the regulations:

   http://www.celfosc.org/biblio/legal/#reglament  (RTF+ZIP, 60Kb)

(as I do not work with rtf easily and there may be people like me,
I've put its html version on
 http://amper.ped.muni.cz/light/catalonia/reglament.html )

It seems that the rules remained the same as in the draft I had an English
version of. So my two months old comments given below still apply -- I
think the case is a serious one! Catalonia should not become a bad
precedent.

Those of you, who can read better than me the languages of Spain (and
are not yet members of the celfosc) should surely enter the debate --
perhaps by writing it in English here and just sending a short remark to
celfosc members to have a look in magnitude6 arhives.

clear fullmoon skies for Leonids,
 jenik

PS.
 Meanwhile, I've made a fourth version of the proposal for the Czech
regulations. The main difference from the third version is introducing
minimum utilances for roads (proportions of the light from
luminaires hitting the target area) -- I would appreciate your comments
esp. on this bottom limit. The present version is again on
 http://svetlo.astro.cz/darksky .

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2002 21:27:24 +0200 (CEST)
From: Jan Hollan <jhollan@amper....muni.cz>
To: Ramon San Martin <ramon.san.martin@upc...>
Subject: Re: Regulations of Catalonia  Law

Dear Ramon,

thank you very much,

my paper together with other texts I took to use them ev. during my
speech is available at
  http://amper.ped.muni.cz/light/tmp
 (it has been a backup in case I would lost the disk with them...).
In the draft of the Czech regulations, the luminance limit of 1 cd/m2 is
still missing, I have to add it there, it's really important to prevent
the steady rise of commercial lighting.

One step upwards, there is an pdf file with an English version of detailed
instructions put together in Italy, VISUALreg17eng.pdf, you may prefer
an Italian one available at
  http://www.cielobuio.org/lombardia.php
 as a pdf or html, the html version directly is
  http://www.cielobuio.org/visualreg17.php

My impression from the first glance:

The proposed regulations for Catalonia seem to me very liberal towards
the producers of pollution and not much protecting the citizens in all
respects.  When there is a technology, avoiding direct light to the upper
semispace completely (as used over the bridge and by the railway station
in Lucerne, over Swiss railways, over many busy streets in Vienna and in
many other cities and regions all over the world, including already some
Czech examples as well), why not demand its use everywhere?

(And why should be facades lit many times more than the roads?)

As I see now, the numbers mentioned in the CIE 126 from 1997 (very
outdated already, in the view of rising recognition of adverse influences
of artificial lighting), do not say that, e.g., the limit for ULORinst
should be 25% for E4, but that it should be 0-25%. Already in that time
the view that a safe value should be quite probably lower than 25 and
maybe zero, existed. I am sure that view is much stronger now, supported
by thousands of representatives in the parliaments of towns, regions and
states, where the 0 cd/klm limit at 90 degrees and over exists already,
not in the regulations, but directly within the law.

We won't diminish the pollution (it is horribly large now already) by
avoiding just the worst lamps, but but demanding the use of just the best
ones.

.....

best regards,
 Jenik

PS.
 the idea to limit the luminances of shop windows is appealing, even
if adherence to such limits won't be quite easy to verify