Watch Sexy New LED Streetlights Appear On Mission

/ Todd_Lappin

San Francisco is gradually replacing its old streetlights with new LED fixtures.  La Lengua rebel propagandist Burrito Justice documented the transition on of one fixture Mission just south of Precita this morning.

Watch:

Burrito Justice says that from start-to-finish, the process took about 10 minutes.

The San Francisco Water Power and Sewer website explains why the new LED streetlights are so sexy:

The City’s street lighting system is improving. Starting in 2017, we’ll begin replacing approximately 18,500 City-owned high-pressure sodium street light fixtures with money saving, ultra-efficient light emitting diode (LED) fixtures.

The new LEDs will improve lighting conditions throughout the City and will last about four times longer than existing lights while using half as much electricity.

Our new LEDs, with a color temperature of 3000 Kelvin, will emit warm, white light. Installation is quick and easy with little to no construction impacts on private property.

Perhaps best of all, our LEDs (like all existing City street lights) will be powered by our 100 percent greenhouse gas-free energy portfolio which includes Hetch Hetchy hydroelectric energy and solar energy.

PHOTO and GIF: Courtesy of Burrito Justice

8 thoughts on “Watch Sexy New LED Streetlights Appear On Mission”

  1. I wouldn’t call the color “warm”, but it’s warmer than the harsh bluish mercury vapor lights and not orange-y like sodium vapor lights. They are bright as all get-out, though. Incandescent and fluorescent lamps emit light over a spectrum. White LEDs (light-emitting diodes) actually emit light in 3 very narrow colors, not across a spectrum, so some colors look absolutely weird under them. Orange can look darker than red, for instance, and people wearing make-up don’t necessary look better under LEDs.

    • That’s not quite right David.

      Without going into too much detail about the various ways white LED can be made, the phenomenon you’re talking about (the range of colors that ‘look right’) is described by the CRI (color rendering index) of a lamp. The vapor lamps always have a terrible CRI, the best you can do is an incandescent. LED used to have pretty bad CRI, but the best of them now approach an incandescent. No way of knowing how good the CRI of these will be, but it will definitely be better than sodium vapor. (You may or may not prefer a street light with a higher CRI).

      Color temperature is a different issue, but 3000k is solidly in the warm range.

      • Concur with Dan. I own LED lights for filmmaking in the 96+ CRI range (not the best way to rate photo lights but that’s a whole dif debate) and there’s very little color shift all things considered. I doubt these are rated that high, but LEDs have come a long way in just the last few years and can be as warm as you want them to be.

      • Yes, I know that’s what I was thinking. I did do some research though and it looks like these lights are warmer and not as bright as the first LED streetlights. The first ones were cooler light which is more like daylight and tends to affect people’s sleep patterns more and they were 2x brighter than these.

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