False Moons

I’m fascinated by the situation in Detroit. A few years back the newly-elected Mayor Dave Bing enacted a plan to reduce the size of Detroit by half. I can’t even bring myself to bulldoze a neighborhood in SimCity, but here we have a Mayor intent on wiping out a Boston-sized chunk of Detroit.

I figured some bulldozers would raze entire neighborhoods, where the land would then be converted back to farmland or left to nature.

But it is nowhere near that simple. The areas eyed for reduction are sparsely populated, with many locals not willing to pickup and go (nor should they be forced to). To compound things, the vacated houses are riddled with asbestos, a souvenir from Detroit’s glory days. Even if the targeted areas were devoid of residents and asbestos, the city is shouldering a massive debt that prevents funding any major works project.

So the resulting situation is a stand-still where the population continues to be stretched thin over a large area, which is running a toll on municipal services well beyond Detroit’s operating budget. And now the latest development has the city planning to turn off half the lights. The goal is two-fold, to save money and to persuade residents to relocate to areas with a greater concentration of people.

There are a few things I am unclear of. Are entire neighborhoods going dark or is there a random pattern to reducing lights (like shutting off every other lamp)? Are non-lit areas a lower priority for police and fire crews? I’m also curious to see if the city is liable for endangering residents.

This situation has been on the brain for the past week or so, and I began to think there must be some way to offer safe lighting using fewer lights tasked with greater coverage. I arrived at something from a Sci-Fi film. Giant moon-like lights suspended high in the air (either floating like a hot air balloon that is tethered down, or affixed to a tall structure like a radio tower). I couldn’t begin to say what kind of lights (Halogen? LED?) or offer any numbers in regards to power consumption. My only hope is that they would be more power efficient than the X number of street lamps they’d be replacing.

Potentially these would be ideal for Detroit and other cities that are down-scaling. But I’d like to take it a step further and see these being applied in any city or town looking for efficient lighting. I know it’s far from perfect, as there would be many logistical problems in suspending numerous lights hundreds of feet into the sky (like lightning I imagine).

Long story short, I thought I’d post this as food-for-thought. Or to one day provide a courtroom jury valuable insight into my mind.

Notes:

The ones you see above are based on hot air balloons. Looking at them now, I’d probable tether each light to neighboring lights, and also to tall fixed structures to help resist the wind.

I’d have the lights work in tandem with the real moon. So if there is a full moon detected above the lights would dim a bit to save power.

This reminds of that scene from the film A.I. (I won’t spoil the film). It’s one of those films you only need to watch once, but man does it stay with you.

Maybe have these come down during the day? That would be rather festive to see them raised every night.