Have you ever been to Japan? Overengineering solutions to things is about 11% of their economy, which edges out other major business sectors such as: the manufacture of flashing lights and machines that speak (9%), crazy fancy dress outfits (6%), pachinko (4%), advertising of strange things with Western spokesmen (4%), and automobile manufacturing (3%).
Leaving 63% for hentai.
Sounds about right.
I can’t think of many innovations I’ve seen roll out so quickly, because other than unit cost and time to replace them it’s a win-win-win opportunity. Significantly lower power costs, much higher reliability, vastly extended lifetime/replacement periods, better visibility, somewhat greater durability (other than electrical) and the ability to implement other new features like focused visibility, which reduces dumb-ass accidents.
They went from a rarity - identifiable by their generally brighter look and blue-green color on the green signal - to nearly universal in about 2-3 years around Sacramento, and that must be 15 years or more ago. I expect the next round of replacements will include further enhancements… including, in snow and ice climes, built-in thermostatic heating rings.
[complete hijack] Ever since I saw the puzzler about this one, it really bugs me. Can we start the campaign for 24/7/52? Or 24/365? [/complete hijack]
yes, I’ve been there twice and worked for two Japanese companies.
Why would the right have a problem with LED lights?
Seems like it should be the left, since all LED lights, especially those for household use, have surveillance circuitry built in that transmits all sounds (and, for the bigger reflector-type lights that tend to point down into rooms, video) via carrier-current signals to regional monitoring stations. The right tends to be fine with that kind of stuff.
Shhhh! I’m workin’, here.
Well, I haven’t heard that, but I do know that when they break, they spew mercury for miles in all directions like the Exxon Valdez spilled oil.
Well, that’s the popular line, but the fact is that mercury is required in LED substrates to shape the special light wavelengths that promote skin cancer.
Your detachment from reality must fascinate mental health experts the world over.
Do you believe everything the lamestream media tells you?
It appears to me that the problem is retrofitting by simply replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs. The incandescents were expected to melt the snow off, apparently. The real solution is to redesign the traffic lights so that snow can’t accumulate on them. That’ll cost more, short term, but should work in the long run.
Some observations:
1.) Does so much snow build up that the light can’t get through? If a layer of snow accumulated on the lenses of our traffic lights, I could still tell if green was lit. It’d come through the snow.
2.) LED. especially high power LEDs, are not necessarily “cool”. I once had an LED melt the solder of its connections and this turn itself off.
3.) Designing non-snow-accumulating traffic lights ought not to be a big deal. Build them so the slow inward from the vertical.
How in the hell am I supposed to know if a particular city has converted to LED? It’s not exactly front page news. I watch the local tv news nearly every night and its never been reported. I’ve lived in the same city 30 years and I don’t know if mine has or not. I do know retrofits for any equipment costs money. Period. We’ve had a bad economy for years and tax dollars are not exactly flowing into city treasurers offices.
I could care less what bulbs they use in traffic lights. What I do care about is that they work and they are visible in all weather conditions. I will be extremely pissed if a snow storm makes them difficult or hard to see. Especially at night. I don’t particularly care to get killed in a car crash because of some snow over the lens of a traffic light. That would be a pretty pathetic and senseless death for any family to endure.
If not, can we at least get them to switch to 24/7/366 during leap years?
All nonsense aside, cities began converting nearly 20 years ago and I’d be surprised if the proportion of LED traffic lights isn’t well over 75%, if not well over 90%. The advantages are so overwhelming and the long-time cost savings so large, beginning with day 1 of a conversion, that many cities scraped together the bux to make it happen.
When I read your post I thought it might be a joke, since I saw such complaints (and accompanying photos of snow-packed signal lights) a long, long time ago. It’s not new, it’s not a widespread problem and I’d bet the incidence is no higher than the problems caused by power outages, malfunctioning control equipment, and so forth. If a light housing is properly designed for the climate, it would take almost freak conditions for every light facing an intersection to get plugged up beyond visibility.
It’s both out of proportion and a little late to get all het up about it, is all I’m saying.
Your lack of understanding of every single aspect of this issue is a thing to behold.
I guess the city engineers are on top of it. As said earlier in the thread it is possible to retrofit some type of heating element. If snowy weather is causing problems seeing the traffic lights. It’s probably not a problem at all in warm weather climates.
I posted the OP because of the total absurdity of the article. To even suggest manually clearing snow from thousands of traffic lights in a city is just insane. I hope that is just bad reporting in that article. I’m not sure what tool the reporter is suggesting they use. There’s no way they are issuing a hundred long handled brooms to city workers.
He says, writing from one of the known snowstorm belts in the US. :rolleyes:
Snowpeckers. They’re going to import and train Arctic Snowpeckers.
That are resistant to the cancer-causing emanations of the LED bulbs.
Looks like there are some technical solutions that are possible.
if the light seems to be able to turn on and off instantly, it’s LED. incandescent light bulbs have a rise and fall time and will appear to fade in and out when the flash or otherwise turn on and off.
FWIW, in metro Detroit all new signal installations are LED, and many older ones have been retrofitted.