Investigating the POLQ to Assess Quality of Outdoor Urban Lighting for Pedestrians in the Context of Lighting Levels Reduction

The "POLQ" is a tool for assessing the quality of outdoor lighting. To the best of our knowledge, this scale has never been translated into French, although it could offer interesting practical and scientific prospects. The aim of this field study is to investigate the use of POLQ to assess the lighting quality for pedestrians under various reduced lighting conditions, and to explore its links with visual accessibility and perceived safety. Results highlighted that the French translation only retrieves one dimension of the initial POLQ (the "Perceived Strength Quality"), and this dimension indeed discriminates between lighting conditions, while being slightly related to visual accessibility and perceived safety. The others dimensions found are promising towards a generic tool for assessing lighting quality for pedestrians.