Cyprus is not short on good ideas. It is occasionally short on the courage to try them out loud. Elsewhere, governments, municipalities, employers, schools and institutions have already run the experiment: they tried the bold policy, braced for backlash, and mostly got a shrug and a thank-you instead. In this series, Politis to the Point brings those tested practices to Cypriot decision-makers with a simple, friendly nudge: the hard part, the actual risk-taking, has already been done by someone else. All that's left is the paperwork.
Every driver in Cyprus knows the moment: a sudden downpour or a wall of hail on the highway, headlights barely cutting through the water, no road lighting to mark the edges or the bends ahead. Elsewhere, the link between lighting and safety has already been measured in detail, and the solution to the usual objection, cost, has already been solved by countries with far less sunshine than Cyprus has to work with.
What the evidence actually shows, starting with Greece
A detailed study carried out in Greece offers the most directly comparable evidence for Cyprus. Researchers analysed 358,485 police-recorded road accidents across Greece between 1996 and 2008, examining both urban and rural roads, and found that lit roads consistently produced fewer accidents than unlit ones, and that the protective effect of lighting grew stronger the more severe the accident. The same study found that the share of fatal and severe injuries among heavy vehicles was almost twice as high in darkness as in adequately lit conditions.
Separate research comparing road safety data across EU countries specifically examined Greek accident figures alongside the UK's, choosing Greece because of its comparatively poor road injury record, and found that the presence of street lighting reduced injury severity by roughly a factor of three, a similar scale of benefit to what the same analysis found in the UK. Together, the two pieces of Greek research point in the same direction: in a country with a climate, road network and driving culture close to Cyprus's own, better lighting produces a clear, measurable reduction in how badly people are hurt.
The Greek findings sit within a much broader and consistent body of international research. A systematic review by Cochrane researchers, pooling data from controlled studies conducted in high-income countries, found that street lighting reduced total crashes by between 32% and 55%, and fatal crashes by as much as 77%. A large Dutch study covering 763,000 injury accidents over a 20-year period (1987–2006) found that lit roads saw injury accidents after dark reduced by 50%. New Zealand's national transport agency formally quotes a 35% reduction in crashes as the expected effect of upgrading lighting where it is currently poor. The pattern holds across very different countries, road types and decades of data: light saves lives, and the effect is measurable, not theoretical.
Solving the cost problem: Spain and Hungary
The usual objection to lighting more roads is not doubt about the safety benefit, it is the cost of connecting remote or rural stretches of highway to the electricity grid, and the ongoing maintenance that follows. Two European examples show this problem has already been solved.
In Valencia, Spain, a section of the CV-31 highway near the Godella roundabout had no public lighting at all, creating a recognised safety risk. Rather than laying new cabling and connecting the stretch to the grid, the regional Ministry of Territorial Policy installed autonomous solar streetlights requiring only simple foundation work, no trenching, wiring or control panels. According to the project's engineers, the installation reduced the electricity bill for that stretch of road to zero while delivering reliable, clean-powered lighting, and left a system that can simply be relocated if the road is ever widened, since nothing is fixed to underground infrastructure.
In Hungary, a dangerous roundabout on the M25 expressway near Andornaktálya, identified as a particular risk for both motorists and cyclists, was fitted with smart solar streetlights paired with motion sensors. The lights run at low intensity by default and brighten automatically when a vehicle or cyclist approaches, a combination that project engineers say cuts energy use by up to 90% compared with standard lighting, while still delivering full brightness at the exact moment it is needed. The project was explicitly designed around two goals at once: reducing traffic accidents and reaching energy neutrality.
Why this would work even better in Cyprus
Both of these projects were built in countries that receive noticeably less sunshine than Cyprus does. Cyprus averages more than 3,300 hours of sunshine a year, among the highest of any country in Europe, with daily sunshine ranging from around 5 to 6 hours even in December up to 12 to 13 hours in the height of summer. A technology that already pays for its own electricity in Spain and Hungary would have considerably more sunlight to draw on here, particularly on the exposed highway stretches through the Troodos foothills and along the coastal routes most affected by sudden storms, precisely the conditions in which visibility and safety matter most.
What it would take in Cyprus
Cyprus would not need to extend its electricity grid a single metre to light the stretches of highway that currently go dark at night. It would need only to identify where visibility already fails drivers, most obviously the routes exposed to sudden weather, and install lighting that draws its power from conditions the island already has in greater abundance than almost anywhere else in Europe.
The idea is proven. The only thing left to decide is who picks it up first.
Have a good practice worth bringing home? If your country, company or institution does something Cyprus should be trying, we want to hear about it. Send your ideas to peggy.s@politis.com.cy - the next instalment of Proven Elsewhere could be inspired by you.
