LED lights are great. They produce plenty of light without all that annoying waste heat. They also produce plenty of vehicular collisions when you stick them in traffic lights and those lights later get caked with nice, sticky snow.
Today’s LED traffic lights are rated at just 10-25 watts — compared to 175-plus for their predecessors. Years after the first LED signals were rolled out, some cities (like my former stomping ground of Cleveland) still haven’t figured out that the changeover means you’re going to run into some problems when inclement weather comes to town.
Cleveland’s drivers have been dealing with plenty of signal confusion this winter thanks to the LED lights. It’s not really the lights‘ fault, of course. They’re doing their job, which is creating light and reducing energy use. The real problem is that no one had the foresight to equip the signals with any sort of heating mechanism that could clear the snow.
Such systems do exist, and have for a few years. At the University of Michigan, a team of engineering students developed a signal lens heater that only fired up when the conditions required back in 2011. And even at 49 watts, it still represents a significant energy savings over last-gen traffic lights — especially since it only needs to activate when snow is detected.
It’s also 2014 now, at least five years after the first municipalities started noticing this little glitch with their new low-power traffic light systems. I swear there’s some phrase about “Those who cannot remember the past,” doing something, but I can’t recall how it ends.