LA changing its glow for more efficiency

After: The 6th Street Bridge after high pressure sodium streetlights were replaced with LEDs (See end of post for a before photo).

(Credit: City of Los Angeles/Bureau of Street Lighting)

Los Angeles is literally basking in a whole new glow.

The city has decided to replace its street lights and bus stop lighting with LEDs. The bus stop lighting will be solar-powered and off the grid.

LA's Bureau of Street Lighting has been actively testing out different types of energy efficient lighting to replace the public lighting that currently includes a combination of incandescent, mercury vapor, metal halide, and high pressure sodium lights.

In 2009, the agency began an LED street lighting energy efficiency program to actively replace its existing 209,000 streetlights. When complete, the city's energy consumption for public lighting should be cut by 40 percent and save 40,500 tons of carbon emissions per year, according to city statistics.

Now the city has decided on which specific lights to go with. Many of the street lamps will be LEDway streetlights from BetaLED. The solar-powered bus lamps are EverGen lights from Carmanah Technologies. Because the bus lights are self-sufficient, they will not need to be tied into the city's electric grid and will allow the city to remain lit even in the event of a blackout.

In a statement released Tuesday, Carmanah said its lights will also give the city more freedom to replace existing lights or introduce lights in new places without having to dig up sidewalks or tie into electricity poles, cutting down on installation costs.

But in addition to making the city more energy efficient, the switch from an abundance of high pressure sodium lights across the city's highways to LEDs is also drastically changing the city's look. Before and after photos provided by the city of the 6th Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River illustrate a clear change in tint from orange to whiter lighting.

Before: The orange glow of high pressure sodium lights on 6th Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River before they were replaced with LEDs.

(Credit: City of Los Angeles/Bureau of Street Lighting)

[MrZook]

Now I'll be able to see the guy mugging/stabbing me downtown!

[MasterChefD]

Well, now at least you'll be able to ID them better to the LA police.... oh wait... nevermind

[skyscraperjim]

The new LED lights may use less energy, but swapping out full-cutoff narrowband lighting for full-cutoff broadband lighting means more light reflected off of surfaces. And I'm betting that the lower cost of operation for LED lights will result in more of them being used, especially the solar ones. Sadly, I see a future of even more light pollution with the switch to LEDs.

[CorwinB]

Maybe, maybe not. They are directional lights and not diffuse lights. I never thought of light pollution as being a matter of reflection, but more as a matter of diffusion of light. I'm not honestly sure if you are right or not. I never considered that reflected light was the issue but it could be.

[ambigous]

This is great news. Hopefully many other cities will be following suit. I've always found the red-biased light from sodium lamps very discomforting and ugly. Our brains' visual "circuits" are biologically acclimatized to function best with a lighting spectrum similar to that of the sun. Artificial night lighting is no exception to this.