Research undertaken by the Lighting Research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Pennsylvania (Penn) State University has shown that drivers are safer when travelling on roads with LED lights, than not.
Quality lighting, such as the uniform coverage that LED luminaires are capable of, can result in a 12 per cent lower night-to-day crash ratio in urban areas. Although, it was noted, this advantage is tied to regularly spaced lighting that drivers experience before a long stretch of road.
The report - entitled To illuminate or not illuminate: Roadway lighting as it affects traffic safety at intersections - was published in the Accident Analysis and Prevention journal.
Researchers used quantitative models developed by the scientists and actually accident and intersection data in the US that was supplied by the Minnesota Department of Transportation.
Further analysis showed converged results and produced a transfer function that can easily be used by other traffic agencies.
On urban roads, researchers noted that speeds in cars are slower and there is lighting on more poles farther apart, which is the main reason that the lighting yields the 12 per cent reduction in night-time accidents when compared to the day.
"While the finding that safety benefits from roadway lighting are highly related to the visibility improvements lighting provides is not novel nor unexpected, evidence for this direct link has been scarce in the literature. Our models provide a tool that transportation agencies can begin using now to not only allocate lighting more efficiently, but to design lighting more effectively," said LRC director, author of the paper and professor Mark Rea.
Many councils in the UK have looked at installing LED streetlights to their cities as a way of saving energy as well as improving overall safety on the roads.
This is because the lighting is brighter than traditional incandescents, which gives drivers and pedestrians a greater field of vision.
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