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Farewell to these M-250R2's
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Not much time left for these M-250R2's here since the city of Northampton recently purchased the cities streetlights from National Grid and have announced a full scale LED changeout. LED's in my area have been just taking over since towns are now buying out the streetlights from the utilities.
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RIDOT hasn't done any new lighting installations lately nor have they switched out any HPS lights for LEDs recently. In late 2014 they had two installations of new poles and lights, which were LEDs, replacing old neglected NGrid-owned freeway lights (NGrid SUCKS at maintaining the freeway lights they own here). So far, they've only "upgraded" one interchange to LEDs by keeping the old poles. It was on I-295 in Smithfield. The interchange was originally NGrid-owned and maintained but in the mid-2000s RIDOT installed M-400 FCOs. 400W HPS on tall davits on the freeway and 250W HPS on short davits on the ramps, the RIDOT "standard" here since the 1980s. However, around New Year's before all the snow, they had swapped out the M-400s for LEDs of all makes and models. The LEDs are dimmer than the HPS but the white light is an interesting chance of pace. The two installations with new poles and LEDs both used LeoTek "Toilets".
RIDOT has continued doing scheduled relamping for their existing HPS lighting and still replaces knocked-down poles with new HPS. They're much better at maintaining their relay-controlled lights though. Their older systems on I-95 are sorta neglected, with lots of poles missing and semi-poor maintenance (not as bad as NGrid, but in NGrid's defense, wiring problems are to blame a good amount of the time. Narragansett Electric/NEES apparently sucked at freeway lighting wiring since the other utility that used to exist [BVE, owned by Eastern Utilities Associates] has some freeway lighting now owned by NGrid in the northern part of the state on Rte 146 and I-295 and those lights never have any issues besides needing lamps.
Recently, NGrid fixed up an infamously dark interchange, the I-295/Rte 37 interchange near my house in Cranston. They spend two or three weeks snaking new cable and getting the lights working. With the lights that didn't work, they just installed new fixtures instead of even bothering to relamp. There were so many fixtures out they probably found it quicker to just change out the non-working lights rather than try and troubleshoot the issues. They didn't bother fixing any dayburners that came to life when they fixed the wiring either for about a month. They replaced two missing poles but the other 15+ missing poles are still empty bases. I guess they're not going to replace those. I really can't complain though. After around 4 years of harassing NGrid and RIDOT, this is the brightest I've ever seen the interchange lol. It's not perfect though. A LOT of missing poles. Until a couple weeks ago, about half of them were dayburning too, they either came back and changed the PCs or the wiring is dead again. I haven't been by at night since the dayburners disappeared. There's still a couple dayburners too. Ironically, it's mostly the brand new fixtures that are dayburners and not the remaining working old ones. And all of the work was done during the day with multiple crew members and a police detail (and one lane of traffic closed, so lots of angry people stuck in traffic) so you'd think someone would've noticed half the lights were dayburning. In a way, it's just leveling the field since the state (aka taxpayers) have been paying for the lights every year (unmetered) even though almost none have worked in a decade and a couple dozen don't even exist anymore (poles missing). A complete mess...
I drive by the interchange twice a day every day: On my way into work at around 5:40AM and on my way home at around 3:20PM. I'm in bed by 9PM (get up at 4:30AM) so I only see street lights on first thing in the morning (whatever ones haven't already shut off).