Live Labs 2 blog – East Riding of Yorkshire Council’s Decarbonising Street Lighting project - progress update
This month’s blog is from Karl Rourke, one of the project leads for the East Riding of Yorkshire Council’s Decarbonising Street Lighting project.
We have hit the halfway mark on our Live Labs 2 project and, along with our partners, it has been an exceptionally busy few months, ranging from technical and research developments, through to a flurry of national and regional media interest in the project.
As we hit the eighteen month mark of the three year project, things are really starting to take shape and we are starting to see noticeable changes taking place both physically and behaviourally. Support for the project across the country continues to grow, with more councils taking an interest in the project and the national media coverage ramping up as the dark nights draw in and street lighting becomes topical.
Decarbonising street lighting: savings on energy consumption, materials and maintenance
The last six months have been a hive of activity in East Riding. Over the spring we focused on completing carbon baselining of our test routes and it has produced some interesting results.
This baseline was undertaken across the street lighting on all our test beds, based on the principle of the project, that we would replace the existing end of life stock with like for like products.
What it has shown is that when people think of street lighting carbon footprint, they think of the energy consumed by the street light, however this makes up only 65 per cent of the overall footprint of close to 100 tons per main road street light over its life. So 35 tonnes of that is made up of materials and maintenance per light.
We are becoming increasingly aware of the need for plain English in communicating our facts and figures, and so after doing some nifty calculations, we put 100 tons of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) into context: that’s the same as 20 street lights, which is enough carbon to drive an average family car to the moon. Fascinating food for thought!
Safety is a priority and statistics are vital
Back in May we started installing our CCTV cameras on our test sites for our driver behaviour monitoring system. We have installed 23 of these in East Riding, with seven more going across our partner test sites.
These thermal imaging cameras are a foundation stone of our project and safety monitoring system. These cameras are providing us with our driver behaviour baseline, taken over a week in September, showing us how road users behave over our test routes under normal, daylight and street light conditions.
The cameras are linked to an AI system which will process the visual images it sees under thermal imaging and will process this data in real time to show us a detailed picture of things like driver speed and braking, along with pedestrian use and behaviour of other forms of road user.
The crucial thing is that by using thermal imaging, it doesn’t matter if its 2am or 2pm, or if the lights are on or off, we get the same images and data regardless.
This system will provide additional data to our initial collision research that we did prior to our designs being completed. This research highlighted a few very interesting things. First is that back at the turn of the century the A1079 was classed as the most dangerous road in East Riding of Yorkshire, in fact one of the most dangerous roads in the country, even with street lighting installed.
Thanks to other measures that have taken place without changing or adding any additional street lighting, a report this year by the Road Safety Foundation classified it as low to medium risk and now one of the safest roads in East Riding.
The second key thing our research on the A1079 and the A164 showed us, is that over the last ten years, and normal investigations only look back three years, 80% of collisions on these two roads happen through the hours of daylight. Research indicates that people drive on average 10% faster in areas of street lighting, but with our advanced AI system we will be able to prove this definitively.
Lighting for communities, in communities
Community engagement has always been important to this project, but this has become a key focus as the months have progressed and has stirred significant media interest recently. It’s vital that local residents are reassured by really up to date facts and figures and that we communicate on a regular basis to provide assurance that safety is a priority.
We have brought together a ranger of leading minds and manufacturers such as Sheffield University and the Institute of Lighting Professionals to look at a fundamental issue regarding some of our test sites. Even though they are major A roads we still have pedestrian usage and active travel usage alongside.
So what do we do to ensure that they remain used and that the public are not making a conscious decision to avoid them?
Over the summer we have received submissions from a range of suppliers with their proposals for what is effective pedestrian/active travel user lighting. There are a range of innovations for low carbon, pedestrian only lighting to replace the full road lighting and they will be installed over this winter.
Studs, white line and signs
Over the summer months installation has taken place at our primary test sites in East Riding of Yorkshire along with making the final decisions on our partner test sites across the UK.
We have laid over 20km of new white line using three different suppliers and a range of retro reflectivity’s, starting at 200 millicandela going all the way up to being the first authority in the UK to install 400 millicandela lines.
The millicandela per meter squared is a measure of how reflective a material is, it’s a measurement of how much light is being reflected and to put this in to context, most local authority standards are 150 millicandela per meter squared, so we are going beyond common standard by some considerable amount.
Alongside this we have installed over 2,500 solar powered illuminated studs using white, amber and red studs, with 1,000 left to fit in line with our new design layouts. These studs have received positive feedback already by providing the road user visual indication beyond their headlights.
September also saw us take delivery of new state of the art printing equipment in the East Riding sign shop now giving us the ability to manufacture the class 3 highly reflective signs, which are usually only used on motorways as class three is motorway grade, that we will be installing on our test sites for any verge mounted signs.
The last piece of the jigsaw, our solar powered vehicle activated signs are on their way to us imminently ready to be installed as the final safety addition to the test sites.
From high tech to local biodiversity
But the work doesn’t stop once the studs and signs are installed. Our world first artificial intelligence system will be fully operational in a few short weeks, enabling us to start the transition from lighting to our new material designs and we anticipate the first sites to be fully operational before Christmas.
Our pedestrian lighting, the focus of much recent media attention, has been evaluated and successful designs have been approved and materials ordered. These will be installed over the next two months to enable our shift from whole road lighting to a pedestrian / active travel user focused style of lighting.
We are putting the finishing touches to our biodiversity monitoring program, to measure the effects on light pollution and local biodiversity from either lighting removal or lighting replacement.
Then there is our carbon evaluation tool. We are working alongside Leeds University in the creation of this tool and real progress is being made with our tool to help designers and decision makers fully assess their options at the point of design or end of life of existing assets.
Summer has been such a busy time for East Riding and there will be no winter hibernation here. Winter is an important time of year for us and we continue to press on with our aim to deliver low carbon alternatives to carbon hungry street lighting in a safe and sustainable way.
Further information
- For more information on ADEPT Live Labs 2: Decarbonising Local Roads in the UK, please look at the Live Labs 2 section on the website
- For more information about the Live Labs Project, please visit the East Riding of Yorkshire Council website
