Here is Milton Keynes the council recently turned off many of the lights on the grid roads to save money (to anyone unfamiliar the grid roads are a network of single and dual carriageway roads criss-crossing the city, with mainly 60/70 mph limits).
I am use to driving on unlit roads at night, but the problem with the grid roads is that they were always designed with street lights. As a consequence they don't have cats eyes, or any kind of reflective markers at the side of the road. It is odd, you don't always notice things like that, but you certainly notice their absence!
At the moment the lights are still on at junctions and roundabouts, so the unlit stretches of road are maybe 100-200m. But our council have form for function creep (in about 15 years the city centre has very slowly gone from 100% free parking to 100% pay parking, a few hundred bays at a time). Maybe over time the lights will all go out.
Any thoughts on how important cats eyes and other features are on unlit roads? Is it even legal to not have them on NSL roads?
My feeling is that they wouldn't put cats eyes everywhere else if they weren't important.
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