Street lights are costing Britain too much

The East Riding of Yorkshire is flat, prosperously agricultural and slightly off the beaten track. Deeply conservative, it isn’t the place you would normally look for originality. Over the weekend, however, its county council announced an inspired experiment. It wants to see what happens if it gets rid of large numbers of its street lights. Not the lighting in town centres, you understand, but the endless lines of light-stalks you see on the main roads that wind their way between the cornfields.

As a trial over the next three years, it plans to switch off hundreds of the lamp-stalks that march grimly alongside the road that connects York and the Humber Bridge. In future, if you drive this way at night you will encounter not a brightly-lit highway but a combination of solar-powered luminous studs in it, super-reflective signs next to it and signs near particular hazards like roundabouts that are illuminated by the movement of your car.