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City seeks help from motorists to identify ice-encrusted traffic lights
By adamg on Fri, 01/14/2011 - 2:15pm
BTD is seeking the public's help in finding traffic lights obscured by ice, such as these puppies on Washington Street at the West Roxbury Parkway, where southbound motorists, being Bostonians, are just barreling through the intersection rather than stopping to see if maybe motorists on the parkway (or the opposite direction on Washington) have the light. Call 617-635-4500 to request a deicing crew.
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Comments
That's one of the drawbacks
That's one of the drawbacks of LED traffic lights. They don't waste electricity generating heat like incandescents, but on icy days that heat is important.
West Roxbury Parkway is a DCR road. Boston would probably pass the buck on the light in the photo.
Will that hotline also accept other complaints about Boston traffic lights? I have plenty.
DCR's website has a list of
DCR's website has a list of roads and their priority for being cleared (as well as who to contact if it's not done). I learned this when I learned it's unlikely my complaint will get the part of the sidewalk on Broadway that crosses the Alewife Brook cleared will be listened to. Bummer.
LED heat
Actually LEDs create a great deal of heat. However this heat is more or less at the rear of the bulb. Seams like it would be easy enough to route a copper strip from the circuit board to around the lens to transfer heat.
This is unfortunate
What solutions should there be. I'm assuming that the savings in energy and maintenance should outweighed a few days where the lights are covered with snow. I find the idea of having crews clean the lights troublesome, it requires diligence and that mean if the city turn lazy, a lot of time can pass before someone gets to it.
One solution is a heater
One solution is a heater circuit that comes on in cold weather.
But then it would be on all the time
Heaters would consume a fair amount of power, defeating the purpose of the LED lights (saving money). Even though the heaters would need to be on only for brief periods, they would be on all the time in cold weather. Maybe a manually operated heater?
Link it to snow emergency beacons
They don't need to be on all the time when there is cold weather - just when there is cold wet weather.
So, in communities with those flashing snow emergency beacons, the heaters could be turned on when the beacons go on, and turned off when they go off.
Ice melts at 33 degrees.
Ice melts at 33 degrees. It's not beyond the realm of possibility to also put an internal heating source in the lights that say, runs around 40 degrees, close to the lights surface.
I'm sure it be easy to construct something that runs cool and efficient, yet uses much less electricity then incandescents, for cold weather climates.
Not sure why anyone's making those yet. Sounds like a good opportunity for a enterprising entrepreneur.
Gas heating
Could gas heating be used instead, this may be a more efficient choice?
Public Works
Why doesn't the City ask for locations of handicap ramps that are blocked by 4' mounds of snow?
how many days has it been?
And the city is only NOW asking for "help"?
Why not go back to standard lights?
Standard light bulbs might give off enough heat to prevent ice buildup. Was ice a problem before led lights were introduced?
They could, but the
They could, but the advantages of using LED is savings on electricity (this also the environment too, subsequently), greater longevity, and more visible than incandescent. Ironically, the low heat is because it is too efficient. The snow problem only comes a few times a year, it would be unfortunate if we can't take advantage of LED just because of that.
Some kind of middle solution that allows Boston to take advantage of the advantages of LED while negating the cons is better.
How about designing a dedicated LED traffic light
instead of just putting new LED bulbs into old lights?
I bet there is a way to make a traffic light where the snow does not stick to, so you don't need cleaning crews, heaters or other band-aid fixes - just design it for the environment it will operate in from the get go.