Street lights and private life

I was coming from the university last week, on Friday. it was already six o'clock, so it got dark by then. I got off the bus and started walking the couple hundred meters to my dorm. Suddenly, as I was just looking meaninglessly around I observed something that took me by surprise. Firstly it took me by surprise because for a month and a half I didn't observe it. It was about the street lights. This might seem quite trivial to a lot of people, but as I am somehow interested in amator astronomy, I have at least heard about the "light pollution" problem. That is, street lights that disperse light over the horizontal plane, estompating the night-sky. But in Istanbul, on my rather not-that-central street, I saw the ideal street lights. You might laugh at me, but as an actual East-European, I have never see such kind of lights until now. But I couldn't restrain myself from comparing the relative simplicity of adopting new technical ideas (such as the street-lights matter) and the seamingly immense stress provoked even by the slightest try of changing someone's beliefs or moral actions.
I mean, in Turkey, as I could see by now, there is no problem in accepting all technological advances of humanity (although many of them were obtained through more or less "ethical" research procedures, and lead to more or less "ethical" human actions or consequences), but there seems to be a problem in accepting each individual's real possibility of taking care of his/her own life.