Since Thursday, crews have prioritized lights at high-speed intersections from the southbound direction for clean up, since the winds came from the north, the city notes. The work was continuing Saturday.
If you come to an intersection but the lights are obscured, or partially obscured, by snow, officials say you should slow down and — if necessary — treat the intersection like a four-way stop.
Last year, new LED bulbs in Windsor, Ont., were blamed for a crash when a school bus ran a red light and broad-sided a car in an intersection. Six kids, a school staff member and the drivers of the car and bus were taken to hospital. Police said the bus driver claimed the red light was covered in snow.
Somewhere in the bowels of City Hall, they were warned this would happen and they did it anyway.
Hilarious title.
This particular problem with LED traffic lights has been known for a very long time, but should have been quite easily fixable… a very simple internal heating band that turns on when the temperature drops below a certain value. Just exactly like they use for those heating cables you wrap around your water pipes. It’s something that should even be doable as a retrofit to the LED traffic lights. The alternative is to go back to those nice warm incandescent bulbs that will melt the ice, but require lots more power and frequent replacement.
And yet, the powers that be continue to bow to the gods of environmental correctness, and install LED traffic lights without heaters, just so they can show their constituents just how virtuous they are.
General electric already had the solution.
http://www.gelighting.com/LightingWeb/na/solutions/transportation-lighting/led-traffic-signals/gtx-heated-shell.jsp
I live in Winnipeg and about half the lights I encountered that day were largely if not completely obscured by snow. Of course, being a person with a brain, i didn’t have too much trouble double checking if I had the right of way and watching for cross traffic. Unfortunately, a small majority of people seem to feel that if they can’t see the red light, it must be green which caused havoc throughout the city all day.
Agreed! Even Mark Steyn would applaud that one.
Unintended consequences!!!! Just think of the heat required to defrost a windshield in Winnipeg when the mercury drops to -25. That heat comes as a by-product of an ICE (internal combustion engine for you liberal trolls), ironic eh! So tell me again how far that Leaf or Tesla will go on a charged battery. Its like the bridge engineers that designed the bridge in Vancouver and didn’t allow for the ice that formed on the upper-spans of the bridge until it started falling in huge lumps onto the traffic below. Nobody can predict all eventualities and we often pay dearly for the unintended consequences.
I wonder how much CO2 is emitted by the vehicles crews use to clear those traffic lights of snow and ice. Considerably more than any savings from the switch to LED bulbs, I would wager. Idiots.
But – Antenor – there can’t be any problems from ice and snow in Vancouver: it doesn’t snow there. At least that’s what locals think. They’re always so shocked when the ground turns white.
So we must remove incandescent bulbs because they “waste” 70% of their energy as heat.
Meanwhile they cost five times as much and leave hazardous waste when they’re done.
So we switch to LEDs and now have the problem of their being obscured by snow.
DaveK, you’re right – I can see the City Council meeting now:
“Installing these extra heaters on our LED bulbs will only double their cost and burn twice the electricity, but it will solve the snow problem”
The stupid, it hurts…
For years, and for many applications, traffic lamp bulbs were available to everyone. . They looked like ordinary 120v Edison bulbs, were equipped with a standard base that fit any light socket, save that the filament was of a much higher quality. Cost was about $12.00.. If I recall they were sold as a 55W or 90W instead of 60w or 100w. And yes, they kept the snow off the lens of the traffic lamps, even the lamps in the red light district of Sin City.
We installed them in our explosion proof lights in our warehouse that was filled with petroleum products; the bulbs lasted forever.
Last year I had a lengthy conversation with a retired firefighter who drove a Mercedes passenger bus for a Sask. hockey team. The unit was equipped with LED headlights, allowing snow and frost to accumulate on the lens. He cursed having to stop on the Trans-Canada to clear the lenses. Keeping in mind that buses are equipped with 400 amp+ alternators, the owners were looking for a supplier that could provide them with a lens that was equipped with a defroster.
We had the same problem with our tow truck. The strobe lamps inside the beacons would not heat the amber lenses enough to clear frost and snow as the traditional 12v rotating spot lamps had for decades. Thus, we coated them with ”Oven Guard,” a silicone based product designed to keep food from sticking on the surface of kitchen ranges and ovens. Worked like a charm on a host of surfaces. The product has since been modified and is no longer anywhere near as efficient. Many other products such as 3M Scotchgard have also been altered and now contain ”softer” chemicals. One of the reasons I was given when I contacted 3M is that the EPA found too much residue (from Scotchguard and other similar products) in humans and animals, including polar bears. So much for the technology that kept my 1960’s Inspector Clouseau style of London Fog overcoat dry year round.
How much intelligence went into designing lamps that have to be heated in the winter months?? The same amount that goes into electrical generation systems that don’t work at night or when the wind dies.
Vote Green!!
Do you have ANY IDEA how many government “Safety” regulations every one of my projects must comply with? Literally hundreds, if not thousands, from building codes to OSHA regulations. And yet … government … makes a RADICAL change to a … traffic SAFETY device … a TRAFFIC SAFETY DEVICE!!! … and ignores what should have been OBVIOUS to everyone involved … !
This illustrates just how IRRATIONAL the “Global Warming” anti-carbon hysteria has become. We are literally willing to sacrifice school children on the altar of AGW. The Warmist god, Gaia, tempted the government’s resolve by asking for a school bus sacrifice … and the government handed the children over. Gaia didn’t STOP the sacrifice by explaining that it was just a test of AGW resolve … nope … a bus load of kiddies could have been fertilizing the great northern forests … and the government smiled at their own FAITHfulness.
The best part of all of this is that the same geniuses that talk about sustainability, green energy, etc., etc., are the same people that are advocating for more unrestricted immigration. Rocket scientists and brain surgeons, all! Unrelentingly brilliant when it come to screwing the Canadian taxpayer but they need a primer on how to screw in a lightbulb or operate a flush toilet.
Dirtman; Smile–Johnny; –Chuckle; –Sask Watch; Head revolves;
Almost happy the outside range of my continuing existence is about a Decade-Tops. 🙂
in Canuckistan you say? well geez, isnt it SOOOOOO obvious? wit’ desert like climate in the wings, we wont need anything involving measure to combat cold, snow, ice . . . .
including traffic lites.
meanwhile, let me check my ‘incandescent file’
– tungsten filament lites, work INSTANTLY in -50 C: check
– work at a full range of voltage up to commonly 115: check
– also work with DC (edison loved THAT fact), therefore, in a serious pinch, one could string car batteries and voila!!
let there be LIGHT !!! (then again, one needs to know the diff between series and parallel wiring connexions): check
-no, repeat, NO NO NO NO NO toxins in the godd&^%%$ precious ‘environment’ when they are spent: check
– provide a much more natural light for situations involving photography, reading, mood lighting: check
etc etc to the end of THIS millenium.
dumfcuks deserve the inconvenience and expense. maybe the accident victim should sue the city for their incompetence contributing to the collision. I would.
The solution is simple. Luckily in Canada we have an ample supply of coal. Just have the government install small coal heaters in all the traffic lights. A small crew of say 100 government employees and 30 one ton diesel trucks with a man lift should be able to keep all the coal fired traffic light heaters running in a city the size of Winnipeg.
problem is that those who sit on councils, usually have no technical skills, or practical thinking skills, and were voted in on “emotional” appeal.
I owned a rental town house, in a corp subdivision. The corp board were all bit….erm, wimins. The roofs needed redoing, sooooo, consulting engs were brought at a cost of 12-15 K (they kept the cost obscured). Finally they settled on a contract at 450 K. When the work started, ABC roofing had a rep their, and CDE corp was the sub, FGH roofing did the work for 140K. I knew the price because I had offered to do the job for 205K, and the FGH corp had done several other locations in town, and they quoted my friend, a contractor 140K. So, uninformed people making the decision cost over 200K. And every bitch on that board was forced to resign and they all sold their units and left the area.
Most politicians are like the corp board was, clueless on most areas were they need to make decisions as our reps.
They actually had those, years ago. Except that they used coal oil or methane.
Enjoy the song. No frost on those lamps!
https://youtu.be/KVgQKImpCh0
That last comment was for Johnoby
Who, or which .gov organization “banned” incandescent light bulbs in Canaduh?
Yeah, let’s all vote for them to solve our problems, eh?
I call BS on this story. If you are educated you know that with global warming the kids of today don’t even know what snow is.
The same people who insist we use LED lights to reduce our carbon footprint import hundreds of thousand of third world immigrants who make our nation’s carbon foot print bigger every day. ( and their carbon foot print is much bigger here than it was in their poor nation )
those people are called liberals.
liberals are not sane people.
And BTW … guess who NEVER provided data from real-world TEST mock-up LED traffic signals, that should have been required and provided prior to spending $ hundreds of millions (more?) in taxpayer funds for this “green” light fixture ? That’s right … the LED lamp manufacturers didn’t. The LED lamp fabricators … forgot … to mention their lamps were not warm-enough to melt ice, snow, if not morning frost. And, of course nobody in government thought to ask … or did … and hid the problem.
Don’t worry, the 25W resistive heater should be sufficient to solve the problem of the ice build up, you only need 3 per signal, running full time when the weather is below zero. (so for simple math, you take a 50W bulb, and replace it with 75W of heaters and a 5W bulb and call it efficiency.)
And don’t worry, the LEDs should work fine in your climate, it’s not like the manufacture had to recall a batch because the bulbs didn’t work consistently when the temperature is under -10 degrees.
There is one application where I like the LED bulbs. They are good for a work light when working on a car. No more burns and radiant heat from the light.
Inside a North American home the heat from incandescent bulbs is not a problems as our homes need heating for many months of the year. During the peak of summer the heat is unwanted, but the days are long then, so the lights are not on very much anyway.
This is also a problem with LED headlights. You can buy ONE heated headlamp for about $1200 (Western Star).
Minnesota (Minneapolis if memory serves) had the same problem a few years back. With exactly the same result. Which is why, as someone noted, there is already a solution available for purchase.
This is negligence, pure and simple.
LEDs are great for indoor use, or where a light can be mounted vertically to shoot down with a shade to protect from snow.
Traffic lights are not the place for LEDS. Nor are automotive headlights in frigid climates.
My favorite streetlights are downtown Medicine Hat, Alberta. Gas lamps have a romantic appeal.
https://youtu.be/ZSMuTm649Hk