Look up.
If you live on Delaware Avenue, Anglesey Boulevard, Beresford Avenue or a dozen other streets, you may already be doing just that. If you don’t, but still find yourself bumping into others with neck craned skyward, perhaps you’re an infrastructure aficionado.
Or a lighting designer: “Lighting designers all have chronic neck problems because we all walk around looking up,” jokes 61-year-old architectural lighting veteran Gerry Cornwell.
For the past three years, Mr. Cornwell has headed Toronto Hydro’s Adaptive Lighting Asset Management Program (ALAMP), a study to determine which lighting technology (or technologies) will best serve our streets – expressway and cul-de-sac alike – and our pocketbooks in the 21st century. Last upgraded in 1993, the city’s approximately 160,000 fixtures will need either total replacement or refurbishment soon, but advances in LED (light emitting diode), fluorescent and induction systems and new electronic ballasts to control older metal halide and high-pressure sodium systems mean Toronto Hydro faces a dizzying amount of choice.
“In the past, the street lighting industry was dealing with maintenance, now it’s dealing with change,” explains Mr. Cornwell, founder of the lighting certificate program at Ryerson University and lighting designer of the ROM’s Bat Cave, Egypt and Nubia Galleries. “A lot of communities are saying ‘Look, we just don’t have enough know-how’… so, Toronto Hydro, to its credit, has taken the approach that we need to have answers, we can’t just throw money at this.”
In other words, despite the buzz surrounding the energy efficiency of LEDs, it wouldn’t be prudent to replace thousands of fixtures with that technology before extensive, all-weather testing is done, so, in September, 2007, Phase One of ALAMP began at two closed sites owned by Toronto Hydro. When computer models showed that some of the new technologies couldn’t provide enough light to meet regulations based on current pole heights and pole spacing, they were dismissed. Those that excelled in the theoretical world were then physically hoisted up onto spare poles and monitored during all four seasons.
In June, 2009, technologies that succeeded were installed in small batches at various locations in the city (a full list can be found at www.torontohydroenergy.com/alamp.html). Sites were chosen to represent different scenarios, such as local roadway/low pedestrian, collector roadway/average pedestrian, major roadway/high pedestrian and so on. Signage was erected at these sites inviting residents (or non-residents) to provide input via an online survey.
The most interesting area, perhaps, is Delaware Avenue for the block that runs south of Bloor Street West. New LED fixtures give the street a decidedly bluish tint, which reminds me of the time I walked out of my little Montreal “four-and-a-half” (two-bedroom) on the first powerless night of the infamous ice storm of 1998. “What’s that blue light glinting off the snow?” I asked my friend. “Moonlight,” he answered, “which you don’t notice when the street lights are on.”
Here, on Delaware, the artificial LED moonlight is certainly enough to illuminate the street, but being a very directional light source, there isn’t much falling onto the faces of the homes, which I find a little disconcerting. More interesting is the intersection of Delaware and Hepbourne: On Hepbourne Avenue, warmer, whiter LEDs have been installed for comparison, and on Delaware south of Hepbourne, the old, slightly orangey fixtures remain, enabling a comparison of three lighting types at one intersection.
Other technologies are more difficult to notice. On Beresford Avenue north of Bloor Street West (near Runnymede), new induction lights – which Mr. Cornwell describes as “fluorescents on steroids” – give off an ordinary white light; aficionados are tipped off only by the slightly larger housing these require. “Most people are just unaware of it,” says Mr. Cornwell, “and where we’ve done electronic ballasts in existing fixtures, people are totally unaware of it because it looks the same … we just changed the guts.”
Of course, changing only “the guts” is better for the environment; while fixtures don’t seem large when viewed from the sidewalk, it’s worth remembering they’re actually 30-inches long and contain about 30 pounds of aluminum. Then again, with so many fixtures of various vintages to contend with it’s likely almost as many technologies as Toronto Hydro is testing will light our way home. “The process is like painting the Golden Gate bridge,” explains Mr. Cornwell. “You start at one end and when you finish you go back and start again.”
But add to that metaphor paint technology that keeps changing, or, worse, that the old paint must be stripped off because the new paint won’t stick to it, since newer lighting technologies are no longer “agnostic” and do not permit components from different manufacturers to be swapped. “At some point you make a decision to move ahead with some, but you don’t do 160,000,” he says with a chuckle.
Field-testing ends in July, 2011, and data analysis will be completed by October, 2011. During this time, any further advancements in new technologies will continue to be tested.
And if this seems like overkill, Mr. Cornwell points to Los Angeles, where it was announced recently that 140,000 streetlights would be replaced with LED fixtures over the next five years. “It’s very spotty, it’s very un-uniform,” says Mr. Cornwell of that city’s new street lights. “One of the principles that’s guiding ALAMP is that we shan’t do anything that’s detrimental to the health and safety of Torontonians.”
But there’s no guarantee to those of us who insist on walking with our heads up.
