LED Traffic Lights Don't Melt Snow, Cause Danger
Red means stop, green means go... snow means...?
LED lights are an excellent lighting solution due to their longevity and power efficiency, but they may not be the best choice in all conditions.
Being from Canada, driving in the snow is just a fact of life. You have to adjust your driving habits accordingly to suit the road conditions. But one hazard the winter snow brings that city planners may not have foreseen is the build up of snow on traffic lights.
Normally, the excess heat generated by incandescent bulbs is enough to melt the snow off lights so that they remain visible even in freezing conditions. Traffic lights that employ LED lighting, while far more power efficient and reliable than older ones, aren't able to melt the snow that accumulates.
Snow blocking traffic signals is a significant problem as it has already led to dozens of accidents and at least one fatality.
Other than switching back to the old incandescent lighting, other proposed solutions include built-in heaters, weather shields, and a water repellent coating. Read more from the AP.
It seems that a method for traffic signalling as old as stop lights still have room for technological innovation. Just yesterday we brought you news of a designer who has fashioned a progress bar for stop lights, which tells drivers how much longer before the light turns.
Follow us on Twitter for more tech news and exclusive updates here.
- Study: No Decline in Illegal Downloading
- Blizzard: Working on Consoles "At Some Point"
- YouTuber Offered $30M Contract with Sam Raimi
- Lesbian Sues Netflix Amid Privacy Concerns
- Twitter Hacked By "Iranian Cyber Army"
- Microsoft Sued Over Use of 'Bing' Name
- Formal Complaint About Facebook Filed With FTC
- Report: Google to Buy Yelp for $500 Million
- Amazon: Kindle for Blackberry is Coming
- Woman Arrested for Not Returning Overdue DVDs
- China Restricting People From Registering Domains
- Maine Considering Cell Phone Cancer Warning
- App Developer Claims to Make $1M Per Month
- A4G Accidently Advertised Sony PSP-4000?
- Nanotech Helps Create Paper-based Batteries
- Saturday Night Live Skit Disses the iPhone
- Verizon: ETFs Help the Poor Afford Smartphones
- LG Reveals World's Thinnest LCD TV, Again
- Sony Considering Premium PSN Subscriptions
Sounds like they should have researched this a bit more before putting them to use ...
make a heating mechanism?
"But one hazard the winter snow brings that city planners may not have foreseen is the build up of snow on traffic lights."
They have not foreseen this? What are they 6 years old? or snow is new in 2009? the hell?
Simple answer. Use the same tech that is in heated windshields and put a heated cover piece of glass over the front of each light. Cheap, simple and no moving parts to break = beautiful
So basically in the 21st century, our engineers still don't anticipate such practical issues? Wasn't this product put through all-weather tests? Not to mention, as sliem pointed out, are today's engineers all about books and exams, and not about practical thinking and common sense? Talk about a lack of critical thinking, but I bet each and every person involved in that design project had "logical and analytical thinker" listed as a qualification on their resumes!
Get rid of the individual round glare shields on the lights and replace them with a single large rectangular glare shield, open at the bottom.
This would solve the problem of snow building up and blocking the traffic lights and it would still prevent the glare from sun light.
Congrats Imrul you just became counter-productive!
http://www.vu1.com/ESLupdate/ - FTW
So basically in the 21st century, our engineers still don't anticipate such practical issues? Wasn't this product put through all-weather tests? Not to mention, as sliem pointed out, are today's engineers all about books and exams, and not about practical thinking and common sense? Talk about a lack of critical thinking, but I bet each and every person involved in that design project had "logical and analytical thinker" listed as a qualification on their resumes!
For an engineer now, if they want to "invent" something, they hit the patent that was taken by someone, but not materialized. Well couple of times & they give up and do the least required thing where they get their paycheck.
There must be a timeframe that a patent drops if unmaterialized for some time, let's say 5 years after issued, so that the patent drops & people are free to think over it again.
I could see this working in the south - generate no heat while requiring little electricity. Win-Win. But, that just goes to show ya the smarts of Canada
Cheap solution: Change the angle of the traffic lights by a few degrees so that less snow gets in. Or, a slightly more expensive solution would be to attach a transparent shield to the front of the encasement, or, I have seen them in "cages" of horizontal sheet plastic in the UK, which does the same job.
Ummm.... I would expect that many powerful LEDs will require a heatsink?!?! So, cant this heatsink be converted to melt the snow?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode
This is news how? I've known about this for years by now.
Seen this LED traffic light problem here in Montana this year.
I could see this working in the south - generate no heat while requiring little electricity. Win-Win. But, that just goes to show ya the smarts of Canada
Our smarts are working just fine, thank you.
Not to say that this isn't happening in Canada, but if you click the read link, you will find that all the problems reported are from U.S. cities.
Law of Unintended Consequences.
What a poor blow to the LED traffic light. Those things save 90% energy over their bulb counterparts which can save a city millions annually..... Shame about the snow issue
I was pretty sure that these have been in use for years. Not only that I thought that they had protruding metal at the top to catch any and tapered at the bottom so that nothing can stick.
paint strips of the conducting material running across my rear windshield, and have a temperature switch. whenever the temperature drops below 32F it turns on and viola, or even better put it on the lenses of the lights so snow cannot melt to the lens, the rest of the light be damned as long as we can see the lens. It cannot be that hard people. Living in the Mojave desert I wish there were a way to keep the road from melting in the summer, I would use concrete but that is not what they use here.
just hire someone (or 1 million) to scrap off the snow on each light. at $30 an hour we'll be that much closer out of the recession.
So, if a light is out, it turns the signal into a stop sign. At least, where I come from. I'd say it's a fail on the drivers that think "I see nothing, so I'll blow right through."
Now, as far as a real solution, the most efficient and cheap will hopefully win. In the mean time, don't drive like a moron.
They could make these traffic lights from more powerful LEDs with RGB elements in them - they have aluminum backs to help radiate heat, and believe me, they can get painfully hot even with a heatsink and fan. I've built one with 6 white LEDs that output the equivalent of a 500W halogen bulb (consuming ~54W), and in about a minute it's warm enough that snow would not take hold. If there was no fan it would probably overheat and fail around 350F. So have a fan with a thermal switch for the summer time, and the switch will turn it off when it gets chilly. Anyone interested can check out my light: http://www.marokero.com/Riegel/
UMMM I live in one of those snowy ice areas..... OUr lights are led and YET we see them just fine.. But then again when its crappy out I dont drive 90mph and try to cut of the guy skidding down the road.. DUnno just a thought but SLOW THE FUCK DOWN.. Ya know just saying.
Considering the proliferation of LED traffic lights I'm surprised it took this long. Of course, local government tries to ignore such things as long as they can, hoping it will go away I suppose, no matter the location.
make a heating mechanism?
I am sure Canada has all its scientists on the problem of how to convert electricity into heat... Any day now.
How about laser vipers in front of the glass?
Oh, woe are we.
Canada, cold, check.
My brother went north and is *enjoying* -40C right now. =D
MOAR powerful LED's then please.
Just overclock it.
Even if they have to add heaters to the lights to melt the snow, they will still be more energy efficient than with incandescent bulbs, for two reasons... One, you'll only need as much heat as is needed to melt the ice (it can be thermostat-controlled), which is probably still less power than the old bulbs used... and Two, you only need the heat in the winter, so you get the full LED power-savings for the rest of the year.
So they need lighting and heat in the same area... Incandescent bulbs are pretty good at doing that!
wipers? lol
or just make a housing.. anyone can come up with a simple idea on how to fix this issue... this is nonsense...