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NYC's 250,000 Street Lights To Be Replaced With LEDs By 2017
An anonymous reader writes "New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that the city's 250,000 street light fixtures, which currently use incandescent bulbs, will be replaced with LEDs by 2017. It's part of a plan to reduce the city government's emissions by 30%. The LEDs have a lifespan of 20 years, more than three times that of the current incandescent bulbs, and Bloomberg says it will save $6 million in energy and $8 million in maintenance every year. It will be the largest LED retrofit in the country. 'The first of three phases to replace the standard "cobra-head" high-pressure sodium street lights, which will upgrade 80,000 at a time across the five boroughs, is expected to be completed in December 2015 with the final phase expected to be completed by 2017. Following the replacement of roadway lighting, decorative fixtures in the city's business and commercial districts will be addressed.'"
Yes, there is a savings, but how much is it going to cost NY taxpayers up front ?
Would a better strategy be to replace the sodium lights with LED style lights, as they wear out?
We have had them in my crappy city in the UK for a couple of years now. They put out better light than the old orange bulbs and seem brighter. The orange colour of the old bulbs is actually known to inhibit night vision, so white LEDs are safer.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I think you're confusing street lights and traffic signals. Places in the snow belt have had issues with LED traffic signals getting blocked with snow, but I can't see the same thing happening with a downward facing street light.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Let me first say that I live in New Orleans, so go ahead make all your inept government remarks now. That said, we did begin making changes in our traffic signals to LED lights and the big claim of "20 year lifespan" was made. Less than 5 years later I see many of the LED bulbs (really, clusters of bulbs, like a Lite Brite set) are now replaced with the traditional traffic signal bulbs. Not only did the LEDs not last very long, they aren't being replaced with LEDs but with the old style bulbs. Hope NYC gets LEDs from a better vendor than we did.
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Yes, there is a savings, but how much is it going to cost NY taxpayers up front ? Would a better strategy be to replace the sodium lights with LED style lights, as they wear out?
Yes, there is a savings, but how much is it going to cost NY taxpayers up front ?
It looks like a 4 year program and the incandescents last about 7 years. So many of those bulbs will be due for replacement anyway.
Probably about as quickly as the plumbers' unions in Philadelphia went on strike when they learned the new Comcast building would have all waterless urinals in it. They sued, won, and forced Comcast to pay them to install miles of water that wasn't hooked up to anything. It cost Comcast subscribers millions of dollars.
Great, problem solved! I'll call the mayor and let him know he can cancel the project...
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Yes, we've had LED traffic signals here for years, and I've only seen them obstructed by snow once. You need a wet, sticky snow and a swift drop in temperature for it to happen. IINM they put remote-controlled heaters in the newer ones.
And it seldom snows upwards. I don't think I've ever seen it snow upwards.
Free Martian Whores!
I wonder how many smaller cities have already done this?
Redwood City, CA, near where I am, is doing it. It's striking, because Redwood City standardized on yellow sodium lamps some time in the 1930s. You know you're in Redwood City when the street lights turn yellow. The new daylight LEDs are a big improvement.
If your community is doing this, push for solar power on some of the lights. Not necessarily all of them, but at least at street corners. That way, no matter what disaster happens, some lights will stay on.
Near observatories to cut down on light pollution. LEDs are too broadband.
Part of my town (the main streets) have LED street lights, and we have no problem with snow or ice. BTW, LED's are in the neighborhood of 20-30% efficient, so they don't run ice cold (pun intended). It may seem so though if you've only touched indicator LED's (flashing lights on equipment).
I don't think I've ever seen it snow upwards.
Never seen a good blizzard?
Apparently, 1/250,000th of one.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I wonder how many smaller cities have already done this?
I think that it's not uncommon (though traffic signals usually go first, since LEDs have been cheap and good at red, green, and amber for longer than they've been either cheap or good for white, and bulbs-behind-filters have always had even more miserable efficiency than bulbs in general).
LEDs are still pretty expensive, and white ones (because they are usually blue ones pumping a phosphor layer) are still less efficient than one might like; but one big advantage is lifespan.
A replacement lightbulb doesn't cost much; but sending out guys in bucket trucks to deal with dead ones adds up.
Well, white LEDs are most likely lousy for low levels of illumination because our color perception shifts with the illumination: our visual cortex expects redder colors in darkness, so physically white faint light looks unnaturally blue, and incandescent light bulbs correspondingly look too red when you attempt to use them for daylight levels of illumination. I'm patriotically proud to point out that this is called the Purkinje effect. ;-) While the fact that LED light appears brighter may lead to energy savings beyond the simple increase in energy conversion efficiency, I wonder how it will change the perception of traffic signs. The red ones will probably appear even darker. What about traffic safety?
Ezekiel 23:20
Why would I trust anything Canadians say? Underneath those obsequious manners and maple syrup, they're planning to invade America. Never let it be said the British Empire gives up easily.
Actually this is a simple math problem.
Two options:
Replace all at once
Replace as they burn out
Either way i have to physically replace each bulb.
It is more cost efficient to replace them all at once in a sequential pattern, rather than one at a time randomly, Thats because the cost to replace is the same, but i'm minimizing my travel distance & times as i'm going dispatch->pole->pole->dispatch rather than dispatch->pole-dispatch->pole->dispatch. You would be surprised but travel times are normally the highest impacting item when it comes to wrench time measurements. Also to add to it, if i wait and replace as they fail i'm paying X for electricity over that time, where if i replace it now i pay Y which is lower than X. The power savings is a fringe benefit compared to labor, but non the less it is factored in.
The biggest question that comes to mind for this type of decision is the time value of money. I can spend X now or X+1 from Now till then. which one is lower cost overall between now and then isn't always a straightforward answer.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
But the light bulb has to be in a really solid state.
Came here to say this. Sodium lights are already pretty darned efficient, if a bit ugly. Sodium lights get 140 lumens per watt, so I'm not sure where their savings are coming from - perhaps the improved quality of light lets them decrease the lumens.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Will this stop the streetlights going off when 'psychic' people walk under them?
No sig today...
Like 'dim' streetlights in Winter because they have frozen over, and (for cities that don't think of these things ahead of time) failure to install seasonally enabled heating units into the enclosure. All in all the human-time and effort of manufacturing and deploying these new solutions, along with the added heater circuit to make them useable, will really eat into that eco-energy difference equation.
Lots of eco initiatives these days come down to someone smiling and pointing to a little device that saves a few ergs of energy here and now, and just over the ridge there is a brand new factory making these things that is poisoning rivers and people with heavy metals. While very little energy is actually saved and unintended consequences pile up.
(Thank You Planet Saving Fluorescent Bulbs for saving the planet by seeding our landfills with elemental mercury instead of evil carbon. And giving me a HEADACHE whenever I am trapped in a room with you.)
And with LED light bulb revolution say goodbye to lots of radio communications. While the goofy things thrive on DC it is achieved through the use of really radio-noisy often insufficiently shielded switching power supplies and forced rectification. And brief high current pulses to 'cheat' higher light output without causing overheating.
Our city has LED traffic lights and even moderately strong FM stations disappear completely at intersections. I have no doubt that this interference affects emergency services' communications too, and that a whole lotta FCC Title 47, Part 15 violations are going on.
No one seems to care because people seem to be stupid when it comes to so-called eco-friendly product selling jobs. Sorry I so incorrigible about the subject, I do love the planet.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Yes, it's true! Street lights use exactly the same bulbs as your home lighting fixtures, so we can expect they'll use exactly the same dollar-store 3W LED bulbs that you've seen. Or maybe, since streetlights actually use 200W-1000W HID bulbs, the LED replacement they're talking about will have virtually nothing in common with the LED bulbs you're talking about, so you're really talking without a clue...
I did a quick Google to satisfy my curiosity and found a few things:
- While high pressure sodium gives off more lumens per watt, LED has better effective illumination (in part due to how our eyes can detect different wavelengths)
- LEDs are more directional, eliminating up to 40% of light loss due to reflectors
- In the end, an LED might only need to give off 20 or 30% as much light to still illuminate the same area effectively
Source: http://www.al-e.com/led-vs-sodium-lamps
You could largely eliminate battery maintenence by adding nickle iron batteries which effictevely have infinite endurance. There are some nickle iron batteries which still function 100 years later.
Although it may have some effect anyway, it would be great if NYC took the opportunity to reduce its light pollution at the same time. With lights that point down, they might be able to use even smaller LEDs, further saving money and decreasing time for ROI. The benefits to wildlife that are confused by the night lights and to citizens who might be able to see more of the wonder of the night sky are added bonuses.
To the union of true memes
Admit impediment.Light is not light
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-nixed dark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wanders Central Park,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Light's not Time Square's fool, though rolling hips
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Light alters not with his brief hours and blips,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me cited,
I never writ, nor no man ever lighted.
Incandescent? Are we stuck in a time warp? What city has had the money to waste on incandescent streetlights since the 1960s? LEDs are less efficient than the orange sodium streetlights but probably more efficient than the more common high pressure sodium. They have some key advantages. The first is that they can be physically much smaller than high voltage discharge lights which means it takes smaller optics to throw the light where you need it. But where light trespass remains, LEDs present an interesting option. I how many of us end up having to put ugly black-out shades in front of bedroom windows to keep unwanted streetlight glare from keeping us awake? What if an LCD shutter were synchronized to close exactly when street light LEDs were on and open when they're off. Suddenly you see the natural night sky from your bedroom window, are awakened by natural morning sunlight.
I admire your "plan ahead" approach, but in 2 small cities I've seen where they had some that were solar powered, they ALL were damaged by the accompanying natural disasters so they really didn't help even when disaster strikes. :(
They are just too fragile to hope to survive things like hurricanes, tornadoes, really bad thunderstorms, and earthquakes.
I'm not sure where you're getting the "expects redder colors" part from. The Purkinje effect simply describes the fact that we're more sensitive to blue light at lower intensities—we see it better. This is purely physical, and due to the assymmetry in the response curve of all of our photoreceptors. While most direct light sources activate the cone receptors, this bias is sufficient to make us think of our monochromatic rod cell night vision as slightly bluish, which is why nighttime scenes are depicted as being blue in art, even though you're literally only seeing something grey. Rod cells have such a wide response range in the blue portion of the spectrum (not shown on graph) that some people can see very violetish frequencies with them, causing eyestrain as we get indecisive about how to dilate the pupil.
Sodium lamps are extremely monochromatic; they only put out a very small range around 600 nm because of the chemical reaction that they operate on. Any white bulb either incandescent or LED, even ones with a bluish tint, will illuminate red signs much better than a traditional sodium-vapour lamp.
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Unfortunately, so does LED. They tested a similar rollout in Oslo recently, but had to stop when they discovered that the LEDs aged far more rapidly than the old sodium fixtures.
Source:
http://www.abcnyheter.no/nyheter/2013/06/17/her-er-grunnen-til-oslo-satte-full-stopp-pa-led-utbyttingen
It's also believed to be why programmers become nocturnal; the pure white light of a computer monitor screws up part of the Circadian rhythm. It's quite possible that all of New York will become even more insomniac after this change. The blueness of the light is surprisingly important; pure blue light is around four times more potent than white light in treating seasonal affective disorder, a form of depression caused by lack of daylight.
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Too late. NYC has been called "The city that never sleeps" for decades.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
In the end, an LED might only need to give off 20 or 30% as much light to still illuminate the same area effectively
Source: http://www.al-e.com/led-vs-sodium-lamps
Yeah, but it looks like what they're actually doing is over-lighting. So there's way more light than before. It's a disaster for amateur astronomy, nocturnal species, and even diurnal species which have their circadian rhythym disturbed.
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In my experience streetlights aren't helpful for seeing traffic, but they are very helpful for seeing the path of the road. Once on a road trip I was out in the middle of Wyoming at night and it was disconcerting to be unsure of the edge of the road; I had to pay more attention to the section right in front of me and thereby pay less attention to what was coming up further ahead.
I live in the Canadian prairies, and I've seen traffic lights covered in snow because there wasn't enough heat to melt them. The city had to send out crews to clean the lights off.
It doesn't happen often, and the LED lights are still cheaper overall, but it does happen.
It only helps if somebody pushes at the correct time; but if the fixtures are being reevaluated in anything resembling a serious way, that's your best chance to get action on things like fixtures that point upward, ill-designed fixtures that don't target their output very well, and all the various other dubious lighting decisions that help add up to light pollution.
Unfortunately, the major impact around me is that our streets are now incredibly bright at night...they used the extra efficiency to make everything brighter, not use less power. God help you if you've got a bedroom that falls within the cone the new LED lights throw, too. My bedroom became lit like a supermarket, even with the shades down. It took four calls to the city before someone came out and re-tweaked the light.
Really, I wish people would pay attention to the studies that show that brighter != less crime/safer.
Please help metamoderate.
Comcast is just one highly visible example. However, I didn't find any reports that the unions sued anyone. The city board of licensing and inspection did vote on whether to approve the building, and the union probably complained to them to request a ruling requiring the pipes. The building developer's spokesperson did say, "It was always our intention to run the additional pipes." Do you have any link that mentions lawsuits?
The urinals in my building are waterless, but each one has a capped water supply pipe sticking out of the wall above them. NJ Strong, indeed.
Is there an unofficial law, similar to Godwins, that applies to people dragging partisan politics into completely unrelated discussions?
It's a disaster for amateur astronomy,
You mean the one star that I can sort-of see in NYC will disappear? :)
I think that damage is already done. My daughter didn't really know what a star was until we brought her to the beach. After that, I felt pretty sorry that I had been singing "Twinkle Twinkle" all this time without actually telling her what the heck a star was...
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
If you want daylight-like colour, there are other alternatives than LEDs. Ceramic metal halide lamps, for example, have excellent colour rendering and about the same efficiency and life expectancy as LEDs, at a significantly lower cost. The main drawback is that they take a while to fire up, but that isn't really a problem with street lights.
Streetlamps for pedestrian safety reduce safety
Bullshit. Street lighting has been found to reduce pedestrian crashes by approximately 50%.
peed bumps increase traffic crashes and reduce safety
Double bullshit. Overall, the treated streets experienced a 39 percent decrease in crashes per year after speed bumps are installed. The 39 percent decrease on speed bump streets is a statistically significant difference (t = 2.8) from 1.39 to 0.85 crashes/year, meaning crashes most likely do decrease on speed bump streets due to bump installation. As well as this gem which asks a different question but which provides the same evidence against your "common sense".
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Another advantage, if purchasers care to implement it, is that you can have somewhat intelligent LED lights that dim down to 30% when there's no traffic around, so it's still light, but much lower power, then run back up when traffic is a block away. It doesn't add much to the system cost to add motion detection and communication with nearby lights, particularly since some industrial/commercial LED lights are adding selftest health/failure reporting already.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
It's a disaster for amateur astronomy,
You mean the one star that I can sort-of see in NYC will disappear? :)
No. I mean that suburban areas which now have a limiting magnitude of 5 or so (okish for astronomy but not great) will turn into NYC. Also, the skyglow from these areas will creep into currently pretty good skies. e.g. The skyglow from the NYC area is currently just visible on the SE horizon from the heart of the Catskills, but we still have some dramatic skies there (Milky Way almost to the horizon). With these white lights appearing and spreading, that is going to change.
soylentnews.org
According to what I've read, NiFe batteries can last darn near forever (as far as batteries go), but they do require maintenance: The electrolyte needs occasional topping-off and replacement.
Furthermore, they're expensive.
According to these folks, the smallest 12V package is $1010.00, and consists of ten 6x3x15 cells of 15 pounds each. It provides 100 Ah of 12V power.
Which is roughly enough to run a single streetlight all night, assuming that the streetlight draws around 100W (which I think is a reasonable assumption). (100 Ah * 12V = 1,200 Watt-hours / 100 Watts == 12 hours runtime, ish.)
Meanwhile, a quick Google search shows that a 100Ah deep-cycle lead acid costs around $200.
Is NiFe a better value at around 5 times the initial cost, factoring maintenance requirements? It all depends...
Kid-proof tablet..
They even have a month of something they call "summer".
I thought the seasons were Cold & Wet, Cold & Dry, Cold & Wet 2: Electric Boogaloo, and Bugs.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
have been over 100 lumens / watt since 2013-03, making them more efficient than high pressure sodium
You mean more efficient than the best high pressure sodium lamps at 150 lumens / watt or the best low pressure ones at 200? Even good, white metal halide lamps can exceed 100 lpw.
Sodium lamps are currently the most efficient lighting source. I expect LEDs will exceed them some day, but that day isn't yet.
I'm going to believe the easily verifiable figures for efficiency over unverified numbers from a politician trying to make himself look good.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Your image is for low pressure sodium, which is indeed monochromatic and very yellow. I haven't seen any in use in years, except industrial things where you need the absolute most light at least cost (LPS is even more efficient than LEDs), at things like big compounds, jails, etc. I remember some cities using them as street lights when I was younger, though.
Settlements near observatories tend to use them, as the single color makes the light easy to filter - and the lack of blue makes it scatter much less, too.
Most street lights are high pressure sodium - much whiter light, but still somewhat to the yellower end of things, as it has little or no blue emission. Very different! Less efficient too, for what it's worth.
Sent from my PDP-11
> Yes, in studies that compare pedestrians in unlit crossings to lit crossings
So, "good" studies then.
> not by comparing pedestrians hit anywhere in an unlit city to pedestrians hit anywhere in a lit city
Given the paucity of "unlit cities" that might be used apples-to-apples, I'll stick with the studies I have to the ones I don't.
> it can actually cause accidents if misused
Note the term "misused" and the lack of the term "pedestrians".
Also note that the only referenced statement in the entire section has to do with stray voltage.
Also note that if you look up any of the unreferenced claims made in this section, the only hits you'll find are people quoting this article.
In fact, I'm going to mark it up now and take it to the talk page.
> Try reading something not written by people with a vested interest in increasing regulations
Instead, read something written by people who have a vested interest in the opposite, and brag about it on their web page. Yeah, I'll get right on that.