Dear Editor:

In a recent Boothbay Register article, Debrah Yale expressed concern for people living near the Southport swing bridge. New traffic lights cast “a green glow that affects several homes on the east shore at night,” she said.

That light probably is bothering wildlife as well. It is well known that excessive traffic lighting can affect wildlife in harmful ways at night, as noted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, among other sources.

Here’s for a return to the far better traffic lighting we had before the recent work on the bridge! That would mean red lights only as before, for bridge openings, with ordinary street lights at other times perfectly capable of showing the way.

Instead, we now have an absolute extravaganza of green lights on the bridge. Three at one end, two at the other, shining unnecessarily all day and night, except for sporadic red lights at possible bridge openings twice an hour between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m.

Green lights make sense at busy intersections, like those near Hannaford’s in Boothbay Harbor. There they help regulate nearly continuous and intersecting streams of traffic over shared spaces. Green lights allow cars to pass by other cars stopped by red lights, avoiding collisions that might otherwise occur. No such complications of movement occur on our little bridge, with its only intersecting line of traffic that of occasional boats passing under the bridge at timed intervals.

In short, our battery of intrusive green lights is sorely out of place. It may be fit for bustling metropolitan areas, but definitely not for the quiet shores of Townsend Gut.

Patty Krebs

Southport


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