Those colourful street lights aren't supposed to be blue or purple
Driving down Stoney Trail or Deerfoot Trail recently, you’ve probably noticed a blue or purple glow coming from the streetlights.
But they’re not meant to be that colour — or any colour. The lights are supposed to be neutral.
And that hard-to-miss glow is the result of a manufacturing defect that’s impacting 70 of the 7,000 streetlights along Stoney Trail and Deerfoot Trail.
“The issue of LED lights turning blue appears to be the premature delaminating of the phosphor coating on the light,” a spokesperson with the Transportation and Economic Corridors Department told Daily Hive Urbanized.
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The coating on LEDs is there to make sure the light emitted is the intended colour. When that coating comes off or is damaged, the colour of the light changes.
This phenomenon has also been seen in other cities in Canada, Europe, and the United States.
Transportation and Economic Corridors, the department responsible for provincial highways in Calgary and across Alberta, said that lights will be replaced as they burn out, but there are no immediate plans to fix the blue lights.
“The problem has been identified by the manufacturers and they are working on solutions,” the department said.
“Transportation and Economic Corridors continues to monitor the streetlights to see how they perform over time.”