Join the UC Davis Campus Safety Lighting Walk
January 02, 2025
Help Brighten Our Community!
When: Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2025, 5-8 p.m.
Where: UC Davis Memorial Union (MU) Quad Flagpole
RSVP: UC Davis Campus Safety Lighting Walk
(From press release) UC Davis Facilities Management invites all students, faculty, staff, and community members to participate in the annual Campus Safety Lighting Walk on Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2025, from 5-8 p.m.
For 15 years, the Campus Safety Lighting Walk has been a proactive community tradition at UC Davis.
Participants assess lighting conditions around campus, identifying areas with low light, non-functional lighting, or obstructed light sources — such as those hidden by plant growth. Insights gathered during the walk will help guide repairs and improvements.
Why Attend?
- Make a Difference: Your observations will contribute to safety upgrades and future planning.
- Free Food & Swag: Enjoy complimentary pizza (while supplies last) and snag free swag if you’re among the first 100 participants.
- Volunteer Hours: Earn volunteer credit—perfect if you’re looking to meet service requirements.
- Community Spirit: Join fellow Aggies in a fun and purposeful evening outdoors.
The evening will kick off at the Memorial Union Quad Flagpole. Teams will be organized to cover various zones of campus, equipped with flashlights provided by event organizers. Please wear comfortable shoes and a warm jacket for the walk.
The Campus Safety Lighting Walk is a collaborative effort between Facilities Management and the UC Davis Police Department, ensuring campus lighting systems are fully functional for the safety of all residents and visitors.
"Campus safety is a shared responsibility,” said Police Chief Joe Farrow. “The Lighting Walk empowers our community to play an active role in identifying and addressing potential safety concerns to make UC Davis a safer and more welcoming place for everyone."
The Campus Safety Lighting Walk also highlights the critical work of the UC Davis Facilities Management’s exterior lighting team, which manages over 13,000 lights and five traffic signal intersections across campus.
"Our team works tirelessly to ensure UC Davis is a safe and well-lit environment. The Lighting Walk is a perfect example of how community feedback drives real change,” said Clint Lord, vice chancellor UC Davis Facilities Management. “We are proud to partner with our community make this happen,"
About UC Davis and Campus Safety
UC Davis is investing more than $20 million over the next five years to enhance security infrastructure, including expanding outdoor lighting, installing additional emergency call boxes, increasing security cameras, and improving card access to buildings.
This substantial investment, announced by the Chancellor in October 2023, reflects UC Davis’s commitment to campus safety. Many planned upgrades were identified with input from students and community members during past Lighting Walks.
This town's lighting philosophy is based on the Dark Sky ordinance. Julie Partansky - yay! There are a handful of UC Davis students coming around the City Council meetings in the last year who seem to want Davis lit up like a Walmart Parking Lot for "safety". I had much involvement in making sure Davis was not lit up with 3000k and above lighting frequency, challenging PG&E and winning so that the core few square miles of town use animal and sky friendly 2700k street lights.
I have no problem with identifying light obstructions, and specific areas that need light for safety, but it must be done in the context of night light that also is animal and sky friendly. In addition, some people think that bright blue-white lights are 'safer'. They are not. Unless you light up everything (like a Walmart parking lot), then once you step out from under a high-light-frequency bright light, your eyes are more constrained by low dilation, and you are blinded for several seconds as you step into darker areas. With low frequency (amber-ish) light, the effect is much reduced, so safer.
Also, UCD seems to like these hideous lights that come on from movement. The problem is, riding a bike, they come on not as you approach, but just after you pass under, making them more annoying then helpful. It would be fine if motion sensors were connected to a row of lights that lit up together as people approached - but the ones they have now should be removed.
I went on this walk several years ago, in response to 'increased campus lighting' called for by a group on campus allegedly because of a crime against that group. Yet not a single person from that group showed up for the walk.
Increasing safety is fine, but the overall theme/message "Help Brighten Our Community!" is demented. The idea should not be to brighten the night, just to fix certain safety issues. Most of the humans who don't feel safe at night aren't going to feel safe with brighter/more lights. We aren't ever going to "Brighten" our community at night nor should we want to. Night is for night animals and dark skies.
Posted by: Alan C. Miller | January 02, 2025 at 02:45 PM