Fewer cars are broken into at night on roads with part-night lighting (PNL), where street lights are switched off between midnight and 5am, suggests new NIHR-funded research in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology.
The study team, led by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and UCL, and funded by NIHR, examined detailed police recorded crime data from Thames Valley Police and data on changes to street lighting from April 2004 to September 2013.
When you pull your car up on a quiet street at night, do you park under a street light thinking it will dissuade a thief from breaking into your car? New research challenges that assumption, finding rates of vehicle theft drop when street lights are off.