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Assuming 100W light bulb and 0.3€/kWh cost, it's ~22€ for the electricity. So I guess we're left with the maintenance. These guys have pretty decent hourly rate
by comboy 10y ago
Assuming 100W light bulb and 0.3€/kWh cost, it's ~22€ for the electricity. So I guess we're left with the maintenance. These guys have pretty decent hourly rate even if light bulbs need to be changed every few months ;) But in all seriousness it seems somewhat understandable. During all these years you may need to change the pole, some elements, maybe repaint the pole, maintain cars and equipment of these guys who change the bulbs and so on. Plus it seems likely that it was calculated as city traffic light infrastructure expenses divided by the number of traffic lights. Then you have some upgrades of electronics, leds, counters or cameras in other parts of the city.
I'm not trying to say that governments spend money efficiently, just that the figure may be not as ridiculous as it seems.
- manmal 10y agoDon't forget the people employed who keep watch over the whole lights system. It's not fully automated afaik.
- pimmen 10y agoYes, and in this case it's just the amount of man hours spent monitoring the system divided by the number of lights because in this case there's not many decisions to be made by the monitors.
- majewsky 10y agoAnother thing re maintenance: When I saw a TV segment about these lights, they mentioned that the maintenance crew will always exchange all three lights, despite yellow and green never getting used. The reasoning is again consistency: If you told the crew to specifically not replace these two bulbs, there might be a mixup and they would end up not replacing some vital bulbs.
- mcv 10y agoWho still uses bulbs for traffic lights these days? Here it's all LED. Cheaper and much clearer. (The old bulb lights were sometimes really hard to see when the sun is low behind you.)
- ygra 10y agoLost of places. Here it's a mixture of lightbulb and LED lights. Also LEDs may be cheaper over time due to electricity costs, but the initial upgrade is surely more expensive than a new bulb. Then there is the problem with snow not melting and you don't know what maintenance contracts are there for bulb replacement and how long those last.
- comboy 10y agoWe are talking about the average cost over 30 years. There were no LEDs used in traffic lights for the better part of that time, and I have no idea about efficiency of light bulbs in the 80s.