Korpijärvi residents raise €14,500 to keep village road lights on

Residents of Korpijärvi in Lapinlahti raised €14,500 to replace the village’s road lights with LEDs, preventing their removal, Yle reports. The municipality has taken responsibility for the lighting, which runs for about three kilometres.

The village association organised a collection after learning that the state planned to dismantle the lights. The municipality had initially declined to take them over because replacing the lamps would bring extra costs. It agreed after the association offered to pay for the conversion. Summer residents also contributed.

The lighting was converted to LEDs in early October, giving 170 lamp posts new lamps. Korpijärvi’s arrangement is unusual, according to Lapinlahti’s municipal technical director, Miikka Hietanen.

Regional development centres have been reviewing state-owned road lighting since the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency updated its guidelines in 2023. Under the guidelines, lights are removed from the least-used roads, with fewer than 300 vehicles a day. In Eastern Finland, state lighting is being removed along 22 kilometres of road.

Eastern Finland regional development centre project manager Mikko Laitinen said a common reason for removing lights from a village is the closure of its school. Before lights are removed, the centre asks whether the municipality is willing to take them over. Municipalities own about 40 per cent of road lighting across Finland.

EU rules also affect the decisions. They prohibit high-pressure sodium lamps because they contain mercury and are energy-inefficient. Broken lamps can no longer be repaired and must be replaced with LED technology. In Eastern Finland, about half of the old lights have been converted to LEDs, and the work is expected to continue until the end of the decade. The transition period ends in February 2032.

Laitinen said lights that have been converted to LEDs will not be dismantled. The centre has received substantial feedback about removals, most of it negative, as residents see reduced lighting as a setback for road safety. Further removals are possible, but not in the next few years.

In Northern Finland, about 20 kilometres of lighting is expected to be removed around 2029 or 2030, when the equipment reaches the end of its service life. The affected locations are small and mostly in Kainuu and Koillismaa.