I hope the wire is dead. Anyway, I've seen MTO leave behind concrete pole stubs of what used to be truss lights for years. I believe there's a few stumps around the 401 and McCowan area. And on the 427 before they tore the old metal guardrails down.
Yeah, some newly built overpasses have them too, one of the overpasses at the 401 and 404 interchange has them but they were never used since MTO was already using high mast when the overpass was finished.
It could be that they incorporated the cobrahead poles into the design of the bridge so rather than go and redesign their bridge designs they just the old blueprints and don't use the pole bases? Here you can see removed poles on older bridges if a relighting project was done. The poles are anchor base though so you'll see four bolts and about three inches of EMT poking up in the center between the four bolts.
I believe MTO does that so if the rural road ever gets urbanized and needs streetlights, installing them would be a snap with the pole bases built in the bridge.
Oh Joe, interesting point. Bovaird Dr was previously Highway 7/MTO jurisdiction before 2003. MTO replaced all the cobras+arms+poles on the stretch around 2001 and aligned them so they could skip a bridge mounted base. After 2003 Brampton assumed the road, when widening and re-lighting again in 2006, they put a pole back on the on the bridge base!
Interesting, I also find it interesting that parts of Bovaird used the Toronto downtown style high rise tapered e arms and Polefab poles. I actually don't recall exactly how Bovaird used to look before the 2006 widening though. All I remember is that they built a second bridge over the railway tracks for the eastbound lanes near the Apple Factory.
Yeah good observation, high rise/upsweep arms are pretty much always used only on hydro poles outside of downtown Toronto (because lights need to be mounted too low due to high voltage lines). I think these high upward arms on dedicated poles on Bovaird is a clever way to get the cobraheads higher to throw light farther. We stopped using these arms after 2008 due to them easily falling sideways with one bolt mounting (but they have now re-emerged in a beefed up form on highway 50!)... one of us has gotta get pics...
PS: Bovaird had 25HPS AEL 125's painted+octogonal steel poles+typical 8' e-arms prior 2006