Stoplights' Unusual, Potentially Deadly Winter Problem

ABC ^ | Jan. 8, 2010 | ELISABETH LEAMY and VANESSA WEBER

[Yo-Yo]

Wow. I live in Michigan (where we are known to get snow occasionally) and we’ve had LED traffic lights for over a decade.

How I’ve lived this long I’ll never know.

[TribalPrincess2U]

In my large Texas town the drivers revert to the old 4 way stop signs.
Overall, most people here are very savvy and polite so it works real well.

[MarkL]

the drivers here don’t obey them so we don’t trust our safety to what the other driver is supposed to do.

Ah, the European system.

Yeah, around here it seems that drivers treat traffic signals as suggestions.

Mark

[Paleo Conservative]

The LED lights use way less power, about 10% of the old bulb lights.

They also last much longer, requiring less labor to maintain. They also have redundancy. An LED traffic light is made up of an array of many individual LED's. If one LED fails, the light just has some dark spots. If an incandescent traffic light burns out, the whole signal fails. What's needed is an electric heater for the LED traffic lights that kicks in when temperatures get below freezing and there is snow.

[ricks_place]

Forgot to order the led with the defroster-heater!!! lol

[muawiyah]

The LED lights last way longer than incandescent bulbs. Ordinary ring type resistance heaters also last way longer than incandescent bulbs. The big expense being avoided here is the cost of sending out a crew to replace bulbs.

[muawiyah]

The reason for not going back to the old bulbs is that they don't last very long (compared to LEDs). Every time you send a crew out to replace a blown bulb you waste a lot of money, plus you end up distressing drivers who find themselves in unaccounted traffic tie-ups getting around the crew.

The less of that the better!