They use LED traffic lights in Milwaukee. I remember after the conversion started, I was out driving one snowy day and noticed that all the lights were out…then I realized that the lights weren’t out, they were just covered in snow and it wasn’t melting. It was pretty bad. Yes, you should treat it like a 4 way stop, that’s basically what people were doing, but some people do just sail right through it, the same way people sail right through non-working lights. On top of this, it’s not even that it looks like it’s not working, it almost doesn’t even look likes it’s there since everything is covered in snow. So if you’re not familiar with the area you might not even now it’s a controlled intersection.
My thought was to replace the lowest light in the pole with a standard incandescent bulb in hopes that you’d still get enough heat to keep everything warm, but still have the savings of the other two bulbs. A thermostatically switched heater coil would probably be more energy efficient and longer lasting.
For those that have never seen this happen, it’s not that it looks like this and if you can sort of make it out (though that is often the case). It’s that it looks like this…you get nothing from it, it might as well be off.
Not a new problem: As others have mentioned, there have been news articles about this problem from time to time, for several years.
It seems to me there is a blatantly obvious, and trivially simple solution that has already been in place in some models of traffic lights, more-or-less forever. What am I missing here?
Take a good close look at this picture of a traffic signal. Note the shape of the sun shields surrounding the lamps. Note in particular that they are open on the bottom ! This style is not new. For as long as I can remember, I’ve seen traffic signals in this style here and there.
I don’t imagine that snow or ice is going to accumulate in these sun shields, even with stone-cold LED lamps. Would it? Why is it not a solution to simply install sun shields like these everywhere?
Building heaters into the lamps to melt the ice seems to totally defeat the purpose of using LEDs, which is specifically to run cold and save electricity. Might as well just stick with incandescent lamps.
Okay, I just looked at the photos that Joey P linked. So. Those lamps have sun shades that are open on the bottom, and they got filled with snow anyway. Now I’m wondering: Why does that happen?
Are these sun shades not open enough on the bottom? Could the problem be solved if the shades were more open at the bottom? Would a hybrid solution work, having heaters that don’t need to heat as much as they would with sun shields that aren’t open at the bottom?
Mostly, I’m wondering why open-bottom sun shields fill with snow in the first place, and given that they do anyway, if there aren’t other simple solutions that can work with this style of sun shades. Would it work to simply have sun shades that don’t curve around the bottom even part way like those do?
Ok, colour me puzzled. In sunny Singapore, our traffic lights look like this. http://www.atstraffic.com.sg/images/ats_traffic-lights-system.jpg, they are basically open at the bottom, and I don’t think there’s physically any way of snow accumulating in front of a traffic light that had shades like this.
I hardly think that anywhere in the US is getting more sun than here, especially if it’s somewhere that has enough snow to block up a traffic light. So what gives? Why the extreme sunshades?
those are available here (typically called “baseball cap” visors") but the “tunnel” style is more common because it makes the signal lights more visible in bright ambient light.
Driven, even slightly wet snow will stick to all kinds of things. It kind of amazes me how many critical highway signs I drive by that read things like **MAX SPEED **[snowblur]5, or even critical warning and directional signs. Seems like in all that plowing and followup berm-trimming, the right-hand guy could reach out with a squeegee and clear the signs off.
I also notice that big-ass pickup trucks, which here tend to be less custom than factory “show 'em what big balls you have” models, tend to collect tightly packed snow… over the rear license plate. Funny how that is.
Drivers have always counted on traffic signals being visible. Even in bad conditions. Slipping all over the road. You could still count on the traffic lights. Assuming of course it is still possible to stop.
thanks to the wonders of modern tech that’s no longer true.
We’ve seen one fatal from it where a driver ran an intersection because the lights were obscured. As I recall, the open bottom visors appeared afterwards when the LED issue became known.
The proper response to this remark would be to ask the obvious question: So what is the City of Boston doing right here? Have they installed heaters in their LED traffic lights? Open-bottom shades? Hot steam pipes built into each lamp?
As we’ve now learned from Posts #61 through #65, open-bottom shades isn’t the solution. Whoda thunk?
