Lights out

SIR, - A recent letter asks why lights are left on 24/7 in an empty car showroom.

First Capital Connect needs also to control is lighting which is on 24/7 at St Albans City Station - even in midsummer!

The questions raised by Mr Reid (Herts Advertiser, June 25) need to be answered. There are no arguments in favour of wasting energy; electricity from the grid comes at too high an environmental cost. Consumer behaviour may be hard to change but change it surely must if Britain is to meet targets for reducing carbon emissions.

White lighting is being installed in local streets because it consumes much less energy than yellow sodium lighting. Older, less efficient technology, appears therefore to have been used for the "yellow tanning booth" bridge at Flamstead.

John Betjeman took a dim view of bright, sodium street lighting when it first appeared in Britain in the 1950s. His poem, Inexpensive Progress, seems to anticipate the life-threatening dangers of global warming:

When all our roads are lighted,

By concrete monsters sited,

Like gallows overhead,

Bathed in the yellow vomit,

Each monster belches from it,

We'll know that we are dead.

R HOGG

Flora Grove

St Albans