This reason might seem a bit obvious but lets not discount the profound and dramatic effect a pedestrian activated LED Enhanced IRWL crosswalk has on the visibility of your crosswalk both day and night to the drivers as they approach the crossing. Drivers, I might add, who often have much more on their minds than the task of driving (see reason number 2). An LED warning system can easily mean the difference between life and death when even an extra split second of braking will have a tremendous effect on the final stopping point of a 3000 pound vehicle.
Never before in the history of the automobile has distracted driving been such a dangerous and universally practiced habit. Affecting nearly all socioeconomic and age ranges, it’s considered by some to be the number one cause of accidents on our roadways today. Some estimates put the number of drivers who are driving distracted at any given time in the range of 7 to 10 percent. If you have 10,000 cars a day approaching a crosswalk some quick math disturbingly shows that 700 to 1000 times a day a driver is approaching that crosswalk while driving distracted.
A well-documented and very concerning side effect of driving while distracted is a dramatically reduced field of view called Tunnel Vision. In some cases signs and warning beacons installed on the roadside or on overhead mast arms have become virtually invisible to a driver experiencing this effect. To date, LED in road warning systems are the only warning systems that remain in the field of view of a distracted driver experiencing tunnel vision.
We live in a litigious world. A pedestrian struck in a crosswalk will quickly be on the target client list of our nations finest and brightest legal minds. When it comes to pedestrian / vehicle incidents some estimates put the legal costs for a single case upwards of $300,000. A quality IRWL system can be installed, in many cases, for one tenth of the cost of the potential legal liabilities from a single case.
Probably not one of the reasons you were expecting however, when it comes to streetscape beautification projects there are few things that will mar the street view more rapidly than an industrial set of posts, beacons and overhead mast arms. Today’s IRWL systems are low profile and for all intents and purposes blend into the roadway until it’s time for them to do their job. And when it comes to reliability, today’s quality systems are shipping with 5 year warranties, require little to no maintenance, and in many cases are still performing reliably 8 to 10 years into their service life.
LaneLight carries a variety of traffic safety systems to mitigate the risks posed to those using crosswalks, from in-road LED warning lights to LED enhanced signs.
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