With almost every country in the world trying to reduce its impact on the environment, the adoption of LED (light emitting diode) lighting has started to become apparent. Programmable traffic signs make use of LED lighting to transfer the work of three or four specific traffic lights into a single programmable display. For example, an intersection (depending on where you live) that makes use of traffic lights has a green, orange and red light for each direction. On top of this they will also have a light to say when you can walk across the crossing and a light that says you can’t. In total that is twenty separate lights. You can quite easily cut that down to eight.
How this works is by having a single light per direction that depicts the color to direct traffic and a single light for each direction that depicts whether or not it is safe to cross for pedestrians. The lights do not have to rely on tinged glass because they are LED lights that can display a color based upon how they are coded. They can also draw symbols and are a lot cheaper to run than a standard light. For a large city that may have thousands of sets of traffic lights this can potentially save millions of dollars in the long term and will dramatically decrease their carbon foot print.
Programmable traffic signs can also be reprogrammed in the event the system needs to be altered. If they decide to suddenly change the color of a stop sign to purple, there is no need to remove the light and replace it; it is just a matter of replacing a few lines of code to depict the color they wish to show. This is essentially a time and cost cutting measure that can be utilized for the long term.