Posted on 01/19/2010 9:50:44 AM PST by pf flyers
Here’s a warning you can give to your company’s drivers: Beware snow-covered traffic signals. They’re a new problem due to energy-efficiency efforts.
Many traffic lights now use LED bulbs instead of incandescent ones. Reason: The LEDs are 80% to 90% more energy-efficient.
And that energy efficiency is the problem. The energy wasted by incandescent bulbs was heat. But in winter storms, that heat was melting snow that accumulated on the lights.
The LEDs don’t generate enough heat to melt snow, and that’s been blamed for one traffic fatality and dozens of other collisions and injuries.
In a storm in Illinois last April, 34-year-old Lisa Richter had a green light and entered an intersection. A driver coming from the opposite direction couldn’t see the red light that was obscured by snow and plowed into Richter’s car, killing her.
The snow doesn’t stick to the lights in every storm. The snow has to be wet and the wind blowing in the right direction to obscure the LED lights.
When motorists have called in about lights obscured by snow, crews have had to manually clear them off. In some places they blow the snow off using compressed air.
Several solutions are being tried, such as using heating elements like those in airport runway lights, installing weather shields or coating the lights with water-repellent substances.
Your company drivers probably know that when a traffic light isn’t working because of a power outage, they should treat the intersection as a four-way stop. The same goes if the lights are obscured by snow. They should stop before entering the intersection.
They sound like they would be great for indoor lighting but not so much for outdoor use.
Ask any firefighter that has received special training for electric car extrication. Cut the wrong post and your fried!
it’s okay - only humans get killed.
Humans aren’t considered part of the ecology. We don’t count.
Now if it endangered a snail or ...
yah...our illustrious leaders here just announced that they got “stimulus” money to “upgrade” our traffic lights to LEDs too.
We’ve been waiting 12 years or longer to synchronize the existing signals to improve traffic flow, but there’s no money for that...
The irony of this is that they will probably need heaters that use almost the same wattage as the old incandescent bulbs to keep the lights clear in foul weather. And the expense of buying and installing those heaters will probably negate whatever electricity savings there might have been.
The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.
Problem easily solved, its a shame people didn't think of this AHEAD of time.
Totally wrong premise.
Inanimate objects such as traffic lights, guns, SUVs, etc do not possess credit or blame.
If a driver sees a traffic signal is covered by snow that driver should enter the intersection with extreme caution. Of course, when there is snow in any intersection, with or without traffic lights, drivers should drive with caution.
Drivers are responsible for their driving and not inanimate objects.
Gun users are responsible for their gun usage. It is not the responsibility of the inanimate object.
To ascribe responsibility, credit/blame, good/evil to an inanimate object is a form of the most stupid type of idolatry.
An LED traffic light is made up of multiple light-emitting elements. A filament-lamp based traditional traffic light has just one bulb per colour within it. Although melting ice is a feature that is inherent in the latter, the LED light is significantly safer because of the amount of redundancy built into it.
LED traffic lights have been used for over a decade now, and they are only discovering this problem now? I don’t believe it.
For cold climates, perhaps they could augment the LED lights with a simple heating coil. This is not rocket science here.
Infallable checklist:
It a liberal likes it - it is:
- stupid
- illogical
- Marxist
and will be one of many causes of the upcoming revolution.
I hate those guys.
I do not think so. A fuse would blow before anything is fried.
My firefighter husband just completed a course on electric cars. Extrication has to be done differently because of currents running through some of the posts. Yes, cut the wrong on and you will get fried.
This is not complicated. The heat is not the reason we have incandescent lights. It turned out to be an unintended benefit. So, all we have to do is have temperature sensitive micro-heaters on each light that effectively keeps them from freezing in snow. That would still be far cheaper than having them heated all year round, with or without snow.
This article is much ado about nothing. It is a simple - and cheap - problem to fix.
>>The irony of this is that they will probably need heaters that use almost the same wattage as the old incandescent bulbs to keep the lights clear in foul weather.<<
But that is only a fraction of the time.
Can you say SMARTCAR? Shoosh - save a gallon of gas and there is no limit to the RubeGoldberg contraptions the left will submit to.
And a big part of the savings from LED traffic lights is not the power savings (really, how much can these things possibly draw?) but the savings from not having to go around and replace burnt-out bulbs. Or so I’ve read, anyway. We’ve had these things for quite a while up here and I can’t recall seeing any lights obscured by snow or ice, although I can see how it might happen given just the right conditions. Actually, the fact that the fixtures are basically cold now makes snow less likely to stick and start accumultating in the first place.
Those unintended consequences are a pain!
I keep hearing the city ranting about switching to “green” traffic lights.
Collisions? Well, duhhh! What did they expect when they installed all “green” lights?!
Oh. So you want to add additional controllers to the system as well. More equipment, more maintenance.
It’s still cheaper to stop frackin’ fixin’ what ain’t broke.
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