Look for LED lights on streets near you

To some, they create a nighttime scene straight out of “Twilight.”

To others, it’s more like “The Twilight Zone.” All that’s missing is Rod Serling standing underneath taking a slow drag off a Chesterfield.

Love them or loathe them, the new LED – or light-emitting diode – streetlights that are bathing half of the city of Las Vegas in their so-white-they-look-blue hue are the next step in the evolution of safe, and now cost-effective, night lighting.

Think Thomas Edison passing the torch – OK, the light bulb – to Nick Holonyak Jr., the former General Electric Co. scientist considered the father of the LED.

“Sure, there have been some people who find them a little eerie,” Niel Rohleder, assistant traffic engineer for the Las Vegas Department of Public Works, said of the new streetlights. “But the general response we’ve received is overwhelmingly positive, as in, ‘When can I get my new streetlights? They look so cool.’ ”

For those in the city proper whose residential streets and neighborhood avenues and boulevards haven’t been upgraded from the old HPS, or high-pressure sodium, streetlights, fear not: Your time is coming. What started with an opening four-month phase of 6,600 lights being installed late last summer has grown to now include approximately 35,500 more throughout Las Vegas, with a target completion date of June 30, 2013, for phase 2.

Currently, 23,000 lights remain to be installed in the city’s predominant “cobra-head” standards. Three two-man teams from contractor Transcore are handling the work – averaging a combined 700 to 800 installations per week – with lights being stored on rows and rows of palettes at Crescent Electric Supply Co. in North Las Vegas.

(The aforementioned installation statistic answers the obligatory joke question: How many city contractors does it take to change a light bulb?)

A third phase for the city’s final 10,000 lights, which use older or more stylized standards, could come late next year, depending upon available funding.

The $16.5 million funding for the first two phases came from a city bond that will take up to 10 years to pay off, Rohleder said. The lifetime of the lights is up to 15 years.

With LED lighting reducing power consumption by as much as 60 percent, approximately $2.7 million per year in energy costs will be directed to paying off the bond.

While the numbers-crunching is important – and, no, Joe Taxpayer, your dollars are not being used – the mission to improve driver and pedestrian safety in a sprawling city is imperative, Rohleder points out.

And this form of streetlighting technology, available for only the past decade, is truly state-of-the art.

The greatest benefit of LED is the uniformity of the light distribution. The old HPS, or “yellow” lighting, would create city blocks of “bright, dim; bright, dim; bright, dim,” Rohleder said. “Uniformity is as important as intensity, especially when it comes to drivers being aware of pedestrians or other things that sometimes we all find in the street.”

In addition to uniformity, LED lighting results in greater color rendering – or the ability to see a color as close to its true shade as possible. Pedestrians dressed not only in black, but blue, brown, green and even red, can be more difficult to discern with HPS lighting than with LED, which Rohleder says has a color rendering of up to 90 percent.

How many times have we, as drivers, gone all white knuckles over darkly clothed pedestrians – that we didn’t see until it was almost too late – darting across a street at night?

“Nothing replaces driver attentiveness, but this certainly helps the cause,” Rohleder said of the LED lights.

A side benefit to replacing the old HPS lights in neighborhoods is that many homeowners found them intrusive, with their yucky yellowness burning figurative holes into their backyard serenity, or glaring unwanted into their homes while they watched TV. But there are some folks, Rohleder notes, who miss the HPS lights because they provided free “security lighting” to parts of their property.

“Change isn’t going to please everybody. We take that for granted,” Rohleder said with a laugh.

“The biggest complaint we’ve had – and overwhelmingly complaints have been minimal – has been the initial eeriness of the (LED) lighting. Some people feel at first like they’re walking out into a cold, frigid area.”

Redundancy aside, but cold? Frigid? … In a desert?

City of Las Vegas residents and drivers had better warm to the presence of cooler progress.

“Ultimately,” Rohleder said proudly, “the city of Las Vegas will be an all-LED streetlight town.”

And for those who miss the harsher lighting, hey, there’s always the Strip. It doesn’t get more “Twilight Zone” than that.

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