Switching off the lights in Toulouse: a symbolic measure
As part of the sobriety plan, Toulouse begins this Monday evening to turn off certain streets. But the measure only applies to 5 to 10% of the city’s streetlights.
The Pink City turns off its lights. And follows in the footsteps of many municipalities which, in recent years, for environmental reasons first, then clearly financial now due to the soaring price of electricity, have decided to put their streetlights on the back burner at night.
Announced on October 13 as part of the sobriety plan, the extinction at midnight – with relighting at 5 a.m. – of public lighting in Toulouse begins this Monday, October 31 in the evening by a few outlying streets of the Palays business park, such as rue des Cosmonautes, and in the Marcaissonne district, such as avenue de Gameville and a handful of others. The objective, by the end of the week, is to cut the light in the few rare sectors identified.
Because if Toulouse has extinguished its fires, it does so in homeopathic doses. In total, only 45 streets in the city are affected in eight of the twenty districts. This represents between 5 and 10% of the number of street lamps.
For example, streets will be plunged into darkness in the sparsely urbanized district of Paléficat, or, not far, in Borderouge. At the Roseraie, the road to Agde will be closed, like the road from Tucaut to Saint-Simon, the road from Bayonne to Saint-Martin-du-Touch and the road to Les Étroits at the foot of Pech-David.
The weight of security
Why such sobriety in sobriety? When announcing the ten emergency measures for this winter, Jean-Luc Moudenc, the mayor, had mentioned the exceptions: the historic center and all the places of passage, such as the forecourt of the station, the hearts of districts… And he had added all the sites that are scrutinized by the 500 or so CCTV cameras that Toulouse now has. “I don’t want to sacrifice safety to the electricity bill,” he said of this key safety issue, which is always present in the lighting debate, and which therefore weighed heavily.
Since mid-October, the technical services, under the leadership of the deputy mayors in charge of lighting and security, respectively Jean-Baptiste de Scorraille and Emilion Esnault, have been working on the map of the streets to be extinguished. The limit of the effort was already clear: when the sobriety plan was announced, the savings target was calculated at “the equivalent of the annual consumption of one hundred households”.
For the municipality, which invests in LEDs and streetlights with motion sensors, switching off was not initially the preferred option. But the LED and non-LED networks being intertwined, the mayor wanted “a readable measure”. LEDs are fitted to 60% of streetlights. And these technologies remain the priority objective. “We recently received street lights with motion sensors. They will be installed in the streets that we turn off, ”underlines Jean-Baptiste de Scorraille.