Highway lighting street light fixtures 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 fixture system. 

·         Roadway & Street luminaires

·         Sign luminaires

·         Underpass Luminaires

·         High Mast Luminaires

Each one of these light 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.

Such variables can include, but are not limited to, various input sources such as photos, drawings, survey notes, topographical maps, and aerial photographs of the region that all be used to calculate light patterns.  With RLLD Commercial Lighting, additional variables come in the form of a wide range of fixture options from top American manufacturers.  Inputting these variables into our modeling software is a simple task, provided we have all the pertinent data relative to the project.

This alleviates a tremendous amount of stress when it is time for a government entity to upgrade or install new highway lighting.  Both the design and the equipment can be obtained from a single source, and fixture and mount options are flexible, to a certain extent, within budgetary parameters due to the vast resources in equipment options our firm is able to bring to the table.

RLLD Commercial Lighting carries a wide variety of industrial & commercial lighting fixtures. If you can not find what you are looking for call us toll free at 1-866-654-3961 and we will find it for you. Our home office is located in Houston, Texas with warehouses located throughout the United States that enable us to service all 50 states.