Performance Appraisal of Urban Street-Lighting System: Drivers’ Opinion-Based Fuzzy Synthetic Evaluation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper focuses on the impact of night street lighting system on driver’s safety, uses fuzzy synthetic evaluation method to aggregate the statistically diverse responses, evaluates and proposes the influencing factors and solutions of street insecurity. My comments are listed as follows.

1.     Less conclusions are obtained, and mainly are common sense, it is recommended to supplement.

2.     The description at the beginning of the paper is too verbose, the background introduction should be concise and clear, and the introduction of existing research should be comprehensive and detailed (the deficiencies of existing research and the innovation of this study.).

3.     It is suggested to make fuzzy evaluation on different factors such as gender, age, driving age, etc. to see whether have the same conclusion.

4.     It is suggested to supplement the correlation analysis of each factor to determine the independence of each factor.

5.     This paper uses the existing methods to calculate the survey data. How to verify the effectiveness and accuracy?

Author Response

Please refer to file attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

What is the kind of lighting-related road crashes. Such statistical is missing in the paper.  

Using the word accident, does not correspond with the aim of this research. That is, such crashes are avoidable, so are not “accidents”. It is thus recommended to use the word crashes or synonymous to this word.  

The type of crashes would determine the remedial action. That is, if pedestrian are involved, the better lighting would be a low height luminaries.  

The use of barriers to avoid glaring due to coming vehicles, should have been considered in the study.  

Education of drivers was not taken into account. The signs on the road also were not considered in the study. For example, the sings that invite the drivers to use low beams. 

So, the effort linked to this paper is not sufficient to improve road safety, as another factors could have been taken into account. Such as the “Low beams” sign. In the questionnaire perhaps should have been included such concepts, with a specific question about the need of compulsory road signs about the use of “low beams”. Or on the implementation of lower speed limits at night.  

To base on subjective approaches should not be enough for the implementation of lighting designs on the roads. Better to validate such subjective appraisals with objective data. For example, about the are covered by the luminaries, at the light of the lighting system of the vehicles using the roads, which depends on the type and characteristics of the vehicles (e.g. vans, SUV, trucks). For sure that some of these vehicles have very powerful headlamps, making not so critical the street lighting.  

Such additional vehicle-related and infrastructure signing factors, should have been included as part of the descriptive statistics of Figure 4. 

In addition to this, if using low headlamps could damage the visibility of a road user, a reduction of the allowed speed should be compulsory, at night.

To recognize such limitations could help this paper. 

Author Response

Please refer to file attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

 Accept in present form.