Philips unveils poleless street lighting system

"A group of people including city planners and architects recently put a challenge to Dutch electronics company Philips: design an outdoor lighting system that helps to declutter our streets. The result was FreeStreet, a street lighting system that does away with vertical streetlight poles in favor of horizontally-strung cables that have clusters of LED lights built into them. The system won its designers a 2011 Dutch Design Award, and is available for use in Europe as of this month." Article and photos here.

When I first read about this solution my initial thoughts centered around the possibilty of inducing motion sickness upon a portion of the populace(me), due to wind effects upon the cable. It will be interesting to hear the local population's feedback once the project is completed. It certainly is an interesting concept

Finally, I have always presumed that when a LED luminaire's lifetime is guaranteed for 20 years and output/optics are network controllable - dowtown core areas would be lit by simply affixing a municipal fixture directly to existing buildings as required.

One of the stark differences you notice between Western Europe and the Eastern U.S. is a relative lack of telephone poles in many European countries along with a lack of corresponding clutter at every city and town intersection you see in the U.S. In parts parts of the U.K for instance there isn't an observed power line or communication line for miles and miles, even in developed towns. You really notice it when you get back to the U.S.

Not sure what the neurosis against telephone poles is, but I can see why aethestically you want to avoid them because they soon accumulate miles of cable. Stringing lights from building to build though doesn't seem to solve a problem in my mind - just shuffling it to another type of infrastructure. Also, it would seem to require grid type neighborhoods built closer together....something you see in older U.S cities; Philly, New York, etc., but far less common in the Western U.S. and the midwest where urban areas just sprawl horizontally.

kind of reminds me of tram overhead lines... which are a huge clutter right above your head...

Not really too new of an idea considering that expressways in the UK are lit with a "catenary" system strung down the median

Here in the UK, in urban areas it is the norm to bury both power and coms cables, rather than to suspend them from poles as is USA practice.
Burial is more expensive, but more reliable since buried cables are immune to falling objects, extreme weather, or vehicles striking the poles.
Street lights are normally fixed to poles erected for the purpose, the exception to this is in the City of London, a district of central London. Here street lighting equipment is normally affixed to buildings, poles or columns only being used when there is no suitable building. I believe that some ancient law or regulation permits this without any payment being due to the building owner.

Swaps one set of overhead infrastructure for another... Decent for building-to-building, but otherwise introduces even more noise to the urban environment if you must then install poles to support the wires. I suppose with more light sources, you increase uniformity of light distribution.

blasterman said:

Not sure what the neurosis against telephone poles is, but I can see why aethestically you want to avoid them because they soon accumulate miles of cable.

Click to expand...

Utility poles are never "pretty," but they are immensely cheaper and faster to deploy than buried infrastructure. A trade-off is the maintenance - gotta inspect and maintain them regularly. The entity that deploys utility poles can turn them into a working asset by leasing out space to other entities - power, phone, and cable can be easily deployed by utility pole.

broadgage said:

Here in the UK, in urban areas it is the norm to bury both power and coms cables, rather than to suspend them from poles as is USA practice.
Burial is more expensive, but more reliable since buried cables are immune to falling objects, extreme weather, or vehicles striking the poles.
Street lights are normally fixed to poles erected for the purpose, the exception to this is in the City of London, a district of central London. Here street lighting equipment is normally affixed to buildings, poles or columns only being used when there is no suitable building. I believe that some ancient law or regulation permits this without any payment being due to the building owner.

Click to expand...

Utility poles are by no means universal in the US, just commonplace. In my city, there's a mixture of "last-mile" buried utilities, partially buried (where only the "drop" to the premises buried), and fully aerial. Buried has its own hazards - namely "digger fade" (a play on microwave's "rain fade", only it's fairly binary when a backhoe severs a cable bundle), soil shifting (not as much potential for slack as aerial plant), and vehicles striking your above-ground junction boxes/trandformers/etc. Buried is appreciably less troublesome once it's in place ... the "path creation" project must allocate a fair percentage of its budget to repairing the damage inevitably caused.

Can't say I've seen much more than residential / light-commercial branch lines buried. I suspect the protection requirements are better served by 10-20 meters of air when dealing with distribution lines than the difficulty of burying them a similar depth to prevent accidents and outages.

It's always amazed me that there's no common universal ductwork system to allow for easy semi-automated deployment of buried power/water/gas/communications infrastructure to residential / light commercial areas - requirements for those structures are fairly common and manageable. Perhaps the added cost isn't worth the savings for one or two uncertain future deployments.

We have areas that have power wires on poles, and some underground. The part that is ugly are the overhead wires, the poles are usually a traffic / pedestrial hazzard.

That is one of the problems with overhead wire electric train tracks - really ugly.

It seems to me that there is still plenty of room for an improved solution to the ugly vs decent lighting challenge.

Wandering a bit OT...

HarryN said:

That is one of the problems with overhead wire electric train tracks - really ugly.

Click to expand...

Perhaps, but they're immensely safer than a third-rail arrangement since the overhead wire carries the high potential - this buys you cheaper construction and better integration with the cityscape. The rail need not be 100% overhead or underground since vehicles and pedestrians can cross the tracks at the same grade. There's also no need for the tracks at ground level to be a fenced barrier since the tracks are no more hazardous than regular train tracks.