This stinks... LED lights, to me anyway, are much easier to see at night.
Making life better by making it worse.
This shouldn’t be a problem since battery powered cars probably won’t run in freezing weather anyways ;-)
Grandma was killed in a traffic accident!!! *sniff* Well, as long as the city has saved thousands in power bills... I guess it was a worthy cause./s
I thought civil engineers thought of things like this. Yeah, they'll save electricity, but how much are you paying all those work crews? And if they are on overtime, forget it!
Oh what a tangled web we weave,,,, i love these kind of consequences,,
I know the traffic engineer where I live. The city installed LED lights about a year ago, and he predicted the same thing would happen with his. The city planners were so entralled about the energy savings that they completely overlooked the traffic hazard they present in the winter time.
we have a whacked liberal City Councilman in Pittsburgh who wants to convert all of our street lights to LED...
Space heater
Only draws power in very cold weather
Do I have to think of everything?
All negated in one or 2 days of crews cleaning off the lights.
Why is this an issue? The traffic regs say if the light is out, including if it cannot be understood, then you treat the light as a red light and stop. Anyone blowing through a controlled intersection is an idiot.
No problem! They’ll just install heaters so the total energy use = 125% of the old way.
Reminds me of that time in the 70s that Chicago bought a whole bunch of new, improved road salt that would melt snow down to 0 degrees F.
Only problem was that it gets to zero a lot in Chicago, then what was melted before would refreeze into a real slick sheet of ice and couldn't be melted.
When I was in Vietnam years ago, we kept a lit 60W light bulb in the bottom of our barracks lockers so that our clothing and other stuff didn’t get moldy. It isn’t just for cold weather that we NEED incandescent lights.
Wait a minute! We have those new energy-efficient mercury-filled-curly-cued-lightbulbs- just the thing to do the trick to heat up the LED`s!
They could have left the red incandescent bulbs in place and still had cost savings on electricity.
Once the jackasses have blinders on, it’s hard to get them off.
I realize not all traffic from all directions will be affected as the blowing snow/ice generally will only cover part of the light, but can't these lights be centrally controled and turned to flashing red if it appears something is wrong for at least one direction of traffic? Also, as was mentioned in a previous post, what about a simple thermal switch and heating coil to kick on when temps drop below a certain level?