Helsinki’s smart street lights will find you a parking place
The city of Helsinki has installed internet-connected street lights which find motorists a parking place.
The city of Helsinki has installed internet-connected street lights which find motorists a parking place.
It is not always easy to make a major investment in a project, when it is known that it will only show returns in the distant long term. This is made even more of a wrench when you know that you might not be around to see a project pay back. The limited length of a rail franchise means that operators are sometimes wary of making investments in station infrastructure, such as in the lighting, if it is known that a project won’t pay back before the end of a franchise. Are the length of rail franchises in the UK holding back the development of innovative lighting on the nation's rail network?
After the success of Lux's Lighting for Rail Conference, which was held in Central London last month, we have gathered together some of the best new lighting products that can be used on the rail network.
Russell Sweeting-White is the senior building services engineer at Network Rail. He is responsible for developing a policy and a strategy to light stations across the UK rail network. Sweeting-White is also involved in the setting of common standards for station lighting, which ensure that a safe environment is created for the rail user. But are standards stifling creativity when it comes to lighting for rail?
New York City is spending millions of dollars on replacing elderly fluorescent lighting with energy efficient LED in the Staten Island Ferry's termini. However the move, which is part of massive city-wide cost cutting scheme, will take years to pay back.
Leading rail engineers have challenged manufacturers to come up a lighting network that runs on 48V rather than 240V.
Each year there are more than 10,000 traffic accidents in Singapore, many of them involving pedestrians. In response to these figures the Singaporean Land Transport Authority (LTA) has launched a six-month trial to see if LED light strips can improve safety at pedestrian crossings.
Key emergency lighting systems on the San Francisco rail network failed to operate when a large swathe of the city was plunged into darkness last month, it has been revealed.
The railways are changing and lighting is at the forefront of the revolution, at this year’s Lux Lighting for Rail Conference, we intend to tell you the best ways to stay ahead of the curve. From the responsibilities of drivers to the standards that govern the industry, nothing is what it used to be. The challenges that rail operators face are different too. Light pollution, suicide prevention, energy reduction and easing the pressures on drivers are all issues that need to be tackled.
The Moscow Metro has a launched a new generation of trains featuring LED lighting that adapts to the time of day. With typical Russian understatement the Moscow authorities are labelling the new vehicles as the ‘the best metro trains in the world.’
Washington DC, home to the American power elite, has seen many controversies rise and fall, the latest, however, doesn’t involve presidents or congressmen, but the new LED lighting on the city’s Metro network. And it's not only commuters that are enraged, lighting designers with any sense of history are cringing at the network's tinkering with an iconic, if unusual, scheme.
Chiltern Railways was in desperate need of a cost slashing innovation to reduce energy usage and an inventive application of LED technology offered the answer.
Rail experts are set to gather in London for a special conference considering the current state of lighting on the rail network. The event will address the key issue of driver-only operation, which is prompting strike action across the UK network.
The jury for this year’s Lux Awards Middle East has been announced and it includes a string of big names from across the lighting industry.
A report by regulatory body the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has found that a number of UK railway stations in southern England fail to meet lighting standards.
Northern operates more stations than any other train operating company in the UK, making the commitment in their new franchise agreement to reduce energy consumption across the network by 3.2 percent, every year, a particularly audacious one. The task is even more of a challenge because Northern, which has the oldest train fleet in the country and the oldest station stock, is often at the mercy of events.
The instillation of LED across the Northern network, in train sheds and at stations, is a major part of Northern’s strategy to slash the yearly three percent.
We caught up with Euan Hilton, utilities contracts and data manager at Northern, during this year's LuxLive, to see how the operation is going.
