what's wrong with this picture?
in January the Vincent Thomas Bridge got it's fancy new LED costume, but the hem doesn't match the collar. hard to get a good photograph of what i mean, but look at this "mock up" provided by LEDtronics before the lights were actually turned on:
that is what the bridge should look like, but in reality, the lights on the road bed are blue/green, and the lights on the cables are more blue/purple. why? two different south bay LED suppliers; LEDtronics and Farlight.
why two different suppliers?
LEDtronics was slated to do the entire job, but somewhere along the line, then-mayor Hahn began to pressure the bridge lighting committee to use Farlight as the supplier for the bridge lights. The committee didn't want to turn their backs on the supplier they had been working with, but they also had to appease the mayor, so they compromised and used lights from both suppliers.
that explains why the lights are two different colors, but why did Hahn want to switch to Farlight in the first place?
well...(you know what's coming, don't you?) Farlight was a Hahn campaign contributor! imagine that.
this may be old news to many of you, but every time i see those different colored lights on the bridge, i feel like i live in such a half-assed place. the fact that it took seventeen years to put up some damn lights is embarrassing enough, but then the added cringe brought on by the color mismatch just drives home the whole underwhelming, Charlie Brown sad-christmas-tree aspect of the project.
but what do i know?
that is what the bridge should look like, but in reality, the lights on the road bed are blue/green, and the lights on the cables are more blue/purple. why? two different south bay LED suppliers; LEDtronics and Farlight.
why two different suppliers?
LEDtronics was slated to do the entire job, but somewhere along the line, then-mayor Hahn began to pressure the bridge lighting committee to use Farlight as the supplier for the bridge lights. The committee didn't want to turn their backs on the supplier they had been working with, but they also had to appease the mayor, so they compromised and used lights from both suppliers.
that explains why the lights are two different colors, but why did Hahn want to switch to Farlight in the first place?
well...(you know what's coming, don't you?) Farlight was a Hahn campaign contributor! imagine that.
this may be old news to many of you, but every time i see those different colored lights on the bridge, i feel like i live in such a half-assed place. the fact that it took seventeen years to put up some damn lights is embarrassing enough, but then the added cringe brought on by the color mismatch just drives home the whole underwhelming, Charlie Brown sad-christmas-tree aspect of the project.
but what do i know?
11 Comments:
I have been waiting for your post on this shameful topic. I know a lot about LEDs. Why you ask? In the interest of full disclosure, my late father was head of sales for LEDtronics, until 2002. Between myself and my mother, we own a few dozen LED powered doo-dads, ranging from keychain lights to a full size, remote programmable LED sign. And that’s not even counting the mugs, coasters, T-shirts and hats. Ahhh... engineer swag.
It makes no sense, no sense at all to use two vendors on a project like this, unless you get off on inflating the cost of your projects. Two vendors means doing numerous tasks twice, driving up costs. Since most LED VARs (Value Added Resellers - the folks who re-package base products into marketable ones, like LEDtronics) either own their own production resources (LEDtronics sources all of their LEDs from a factory in Pakistan, owned by the brother of the owner, close enough) or buy them from a manufacturer like the one associated with LEDtronics, unless they are both buying the same stock of LEDs, the colours will end up different. I do not know where Farlight sources their materials, but I am damn sure that their source not the same as LEDtronics.
To my understanding, LED manufacturers produce their LEDs to different technical specs, which are often the result of patented or otherwise copyrighted trade secrets. LED technology is a rapidly advancing field, and there are signifigant differences in the performance characteristics of differing manufacturers’ products. So anyone splitting a job into two bids, and asking the second company to duplicate or match the colour of the first, would likely be quite disappointed, as matching the colours between two products with different manufacturing origins would be both unlikely and difficult.
So why be disappointed? I had, not looking into the matter, just presumed general civic incompetence. I figured someone had a bright idea that turned out to be a dumb one. I mean it took 17 years, you know that the final result had to wander quite a bit from the original intent. Now, that I know that the committee was pressured into using a second vendor for the LED lighting project, I don’t know who to be more ashamed of, the outgoing Mayor, or the folks who gave into a stupid, and likely pointless demand.
This is why I dislike politics, from both the inside and outside, it appears to consist of little more than favour trading, amongst the favoured. I think that doing business with the people you know and trust is a good thing, even if it lends to favouritism, but what rubs me is when folks do favours for folks they do not even know, to gain political advantage, especially during the election cycle. Grrr...
The real question now becomes - who will make it right? Will Janice clean up her brother’s mess on her doorstep, will the committee get back together and fundraise to correct their mistake? Or will we have constructed a permanent monument to half-assery that is and I quote - The Official Welcoming Monument to the City of Los Angeles?
Guess which of the lights are starting to "burn out" (or malfunction, or whatever)?
The roadbed lights, from Fairlight. Four or five of them have been dark for a while now (at least a week.)
Let's just compare the websites of the two companies who worked on this project -
LEDtronics
FarLight
Who looks a little more prepared to handle a major contract?
And where has the Vincent Thomas Bridge Lighting Site gone?
Phill, you drive across the bridge now and then, are the units on the bridge that are failing these?
In other words, were the units on the bottom of the bridge just some off of the shelf, kinda-colour-matched, cheapo units from a local company that bought its way into the job?
Could the mismatch problem be solved using color filters on one set of LEDs to make it more closely match the other, without diminishing the perceived brightness of the filtered set?
according to Wired magazine, "Backlash Brews Over Blue LEDs"
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,67574,00.html
"Blue tends to cause more discomfort and disability glare than other, longer wavelengths," said Dr. David Sliney, an expert on the harmful effects of bright light sources at the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine in Maryland.
Some researchers report that, at night, even low-level blue light may be enough to trigger recently discovered receptors in the retina that can depress melatonin production, disrupt sleep patterns and suppress the immune system.
I don't think a filter would do the job perfectly. Really the only way to do the job right is to go with a single type of bulb. LED technology, especially the colour & lumen output of individual components, is very manufacturer dependent.
Also given the fact that the roadbed lights are already having technical problems, especially given the unnaturally long life of LED bulbs (like 10-20 years per bulb, if continually powered), I'd be really concerned with the failure of the Farlight units over the long term. I'm pretty certain that this project doesn't have a big maintinence and replacement budget attached to it.
I think we are already way to cocked up from all of the crazy orange lights to make us any more whacked out in San Pedro. Hell, the Sheriff's Department used to incinerate hard drugs by the ton in Pedro, I'm sure some blue lights can't make things any worse.
Those units look like the ones shown in the Daily Breeze. You can't see them from the bridge itself, but according to the DB, those are the ones installed in the roadbed.
Calamari wrote:
I don't think a filter would do the job perfectly.
No, maybe not perfectly. But I was thinking that an inexpensive set of filters to darken and de-greenify the roadbed LEDs would do the job at least half-assedly. And if you add that to the half-assed color matching that is already in place, the result would, by my calculations, be at least three-quarters-assed, which is a quarter-ass more than we really have any right to expect from any publicly funded project in our town.
Just a suggestion, anyway. I've got a million of 'em.
i wonder why no one thought to use the farlights on one side of the bridge and the LEDtronics on the other side? then it would only look weird when you were viewing it from either end...
The type of lights on the suspension and the type on the roadbed are different. Farlight doesn't make a unit that could be used for the suspension lights. And you can't switch LEDs around between manufacturers units without customising every light.
I think we should replace the whole lighting system with bonfires surrounded and maintained by constantly drumming slaves, chained to the top of the towers, but maybe I'm too much in favour of more Max Max themed infrastructure improvements in the harbour. At least slaves are reilable, unlinke all this new fangled LED technology!
I don't know about that Mad Max idea. I read this article:
http://www.notwired.com/news/fake/joke/goingontoolong.yourmama
"Slaves tends to cause more discomfort and disability glare" said Dr. David Sliney, an expert on the harmful effects of forced labor at the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine in Maryland.
Some researchers report that, at night, slaves may be enough to trigger recently discovered receptors in the retina that can depress melatonin production, disrupt sleep patterns and suppress the immune system.
So, you know, yeah. Plus I hear Sony won't be using slaves in its new console.
But Microsoft will.
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