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Solar Traffic Light offers promise of green energy cities
By now we've all seen our fair share of green energy cars and devices, but there remains a dearth of public works-centric green tech innovations. Helping to fill the void of cool green-tech-meets-public-works design ideas, Taiwanese designers Cheng-Tsung Feng, Yao-Chieh Lin and Bo-Jin Wang created this solar-powered traffic light that easily could have emerged from the labs at Cupertino.
The traffic light uses a discolor LED that allows the red, yellow and green signals to all occupy one space rather than the traditional three-tiered design we have on today's streets. The trio won this year's international Lite-On Award (Silver Level) for their striking design which hopefully will inspire cities around the world to adopt this kind of green-centric infrastructure in the near future.
Via Yanko Design
By Mr. Gumsandals at 8:02 AM ON 10/21/09
Worthy, so worthy and a perfect example of less is more. Hopefully it will catch on.
By Gex at 8:04 AM ON 10/21/09
What about colorblind people? How do they tell whether it's green or red?
By iamthemovie at 9:45 AM ON 10/21/09
I am colorblind and all those colors have different values. It's pretty easy to tell the difference between those three, which is why they were chosen in the first place.
By symphy at 12:40 PM ON 10/21/09
I'm NOT colorblind, but I still have a very hard time between yellow and red, at least at night when you can't tell the positions.
By genezix at 1:58 PM ON 10/21/09
It appears by the pictures on the website this item came from that it would work even for totally colorblind people. It appears the green phase of the light is not a solid circle but a ring (hollow center). I can only assume the red would be solid and the yellow would be something else. So I don't think colorblind people would have problems with this. Though power should be supplemented by the grid as well because you could have quite a few days of cloudy rainy weather and you wouldn't want the light to stop working.
By thisisonlyatest at 5:40 PM ON 10/21/09
Awesome... If they make this cheap enough, my current town will probably install traffic lights at intersections which recently had removed the lights...
Or, alternately, you could put up a traffic light in the middle of nowhere at the intersection of two rarely travelled dirt roads...
By nicholasjh at 6:02 PM ON 10/21/09
I'm sorry symphy, but if you can't tell the difference between yellow and red at night, then that does indeed mean that you are in some way shape or form color blind, but maybe you realize this and are just practicing for when you run the red light and have to tell the cop a little white lie to get out of a ticket.
By mememe at 3:45 PM ON 10/25/09
I'm colorblind myself and the green light in traffic lights looks like light blue to me. Why don't we change the system to numbers like 1,2,3 or shapes instead. If you can't distinguish numbers or shapes then you shouldn't be driving.
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mememe:
I'm colorblind myself and the green light in traffic lights looks like light blue to me. Why don't we change the sy...More »