Highway lighting must meet two sets of code: National Electrical Code and the National Safety Code. A GSA vendor is needed to provide equipment that will ensure compliance with both sets of regulations. Operability, reliability, and warranted replacements are equipment musts.
Products made in the USA should always be chosen over imports for these reasons. There is no guarantee of quality assurance or any real promise of viable replacement when dealing with foreign vendors.
Highway lighting the most complex and challenging form of all commercial lighting. To ensure the safety of hundreds of thousands of drivers on the road requires a level of design skill that surpasses that of standard building or even parking lot lighting.
This is due to the need to balance two very distinct aspects of commercial lighting: luminance and Illuminance. Without the proper balance between these two phenomena, highway lights will not produce the optimal visibility levels that motorists require for safe transit.
We need to understand what these phenomena are to get a grasp on their true importance. Illuminance is light that shines upon an object. Luminance is light reflected off an object. When there is more luminance coming from behind an object than there is coming from the front, a dangerous condition called negative contrast is created.
This condition essentially causes an object to be silhouetted against a background that now appears brighter than the object itself. This distorts a driver's senses of depth perception and can lead to an increase in traffic accidents.
In order to properly balance luminance and Illuminance, extensive
commercial lighting design is required to calculate the many angles of incidence that are coming from multiple luminaries. The complexity of this challenge is readily apparent when we consider the following luminaire types that constitute a highway lighting system.
Each one of these fixtures produces a beam spread that targets a specific segment of the roadway or object along the roadway. Reflective glare (a product of luminance) is inevitable. Keeping reflectivity at a level that will work for the driver, not against the driver, is the job of the GSA lighting design specialist.
There are two ways that this type of design can be accomplished. One way is to use advanced mathematical skills in geometry and trigonometry to determine fixture placement and lighting angle of incidence.
Considering that highway lighting is much more than fixtures, and includes many other things such as conduits, cable, wires, luminaires themselves, various lamp types, and miscellaneous accessories, the margin for human error goes up proportional to both the size of the system and the number of individual components that make that system.
This margin for human error can be minimized if you work with a GSA vendor with advanced photometric software that can perform these calculations and build virtual 3D models of your highway lighting system.
Not only is the efficiency of the mathematics itself increased, but more system options can be explored by changing one or more variables to see what individual components will truly work best together and perform according to municipal, state, or federal RFQ requirements.
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