The Healthy City Project is urging the City of Westmount to replace all its street lights with shielded, high-efficiency, low-intensity lights, in order to help reduce light pollution.

Addressing city council last week, Tony Moffat, a Sunnyside Avenue resident and astrophysicist who is leading the project, demonstrated with a set of lamps he set up at a table the effective difference between an incandescent light source that is open and one which is shielded.

The HCP wants the City to change bylaws about future domestic and commercial outdoor lighting installations to comply with pollution-friendly norms; provide financial incentives for citizens and businesses to replace their current outdoor lights; and hire professional lighting consultants who would provide information, including an energy audit, cost estimations and advice on exactly how to proceed.

The HCP maintains that by significantly reducing the level of street lights and other sources and by pointing the light downwards where it is needed, the dark sky that people once enjoyed even from city centres could be restored, street safety and the aesthetic quality of neighbourhoods could be enhanced, people would sleep better at night and have better health, and there would be less interference with bird migration as well as huge savings in energy.

The HCP estimates the cost of changing each street lamp in Westmount to low power, full cutoff, long lasting lamps at $400 per unit or $710,000 in total. The calculation is based on 1,766 street lamps of various kinds, including Washington-style lamps that line residential avenues, and cobra-neck lamps seen more often on heavily-trafficked streets. Moffat asked Mayor Peter Trent whether the HCP “can count on you to take note of this and eventually, we hope, act on it?”

“We are a neophyte council, so we’re still sort of feeling our way here so to speak,” Trent replied, “even for an old retread like me. But I’m very sensitive to what you’re talking about.” According to Trent, Hydro Westmount has been taking a second look lately at light sources to ensure they deflect light towards the ground and not skyward. He said Councillor Theodora Samiotis, the new commissioner for the environment on city council, would be looking into the issue.