Hanging streetlights and signals in Copenhagen - eNidhi India Travel Blog

Hanging streetlights and signals in Copenhagen

While we're familiar with electric poles or signal poles, many cities in Europe adopt a hanging model for street lights and signal lights.

A bunch of wires (about 5 of them, including one conducting electricity), tied to nearby buildings hold the lamp in its position. There's no need to erect electric poles by the roadside and that saves lot of road space. Also avoids risk of some drunk driver ramming his car to the lamp post.
A street lamp hanging from wires in middle of the road
The street lamp shown above costs DKK 1800 or close to 20k INR. Below image helps get a bigger picture of how wires hold street lamps and signal posts in position

Above: A building  & street near Copenhagen Central, notice the hanging signal and street lights
Below: Closeup of hanging Signal. Looks easily detachable.
All building owners provide hooks from their walls to which these ropes can be fixed. I was thinking how foolproof and safe this mechanism is. It looks like they are. Since there're 4-5 wires, it is unlikely that all of them would snap at once. Even if one or two fail, remaining 3-4 would be able to hold the lamp in its position, till it is fixed.

What if the live wire carrying current to the lamp/signal snaps? Probably they have an auto cut off mechanism to prevent mishap. Couldn't locate any news of accidents caused by streetlights, so probably the system is fail safe.

Another thought to ponder was that will these survive heavy winds? Their design being round, offer much less resistance to wind.

Neighboring Malmo also has hanging streetlights, but I found it less common compared to Copenhagen

However, in Berlin we didn't find any hanging signals or streetlights. Berlin seem to use traditional lamp post based lights

 Now with above streets as reference, the messy street of Thailand look hopeless, with India being no better.

6 comments:

  1. That is interesting.

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  2. Interesting and this is good idea to prevent stealing of street lights and red lights in the indian scenario!!!

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    ReplyDelete
  3. Very interesting thought crisscrossing cables look ugly

    ReplyDelete

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