Another poorly thought-out idea from the hucksters is the LED stoplight, which (it now "comes to light") can be completely obliterated by wind-driven snow. Old-style lights using incandescent bulbs produce heat that normally melts any snow that collects, leaving them visible to drivers. LEDs don't produce heat, so now - as much as seven or eight years after some municipalities began installing them - the media are "discovering" the problem, apparently because a woman was killed by a driver running a red light he couldn't see. (We might ask why that driver couldn't see the woman's car in front of him, but that's another story.)
The benefits of LEDs probably outweigh the disadvantages, because they can save as much as 90% of the energy cost a "regular" stoplight would use. As a result, government jurisdictions in snowy areas are already finding ways to deal with the problem. One official's suggestion in the linked story above, that drivers just have to be more cautious when they can't see the lights, is idiotic -- we know that's not going to happen, and the casualties already reported prove it. More promising is installing additional covers, but the covers are costly, so some are protecting only the red lights this way.
Nevertheless, that's a lot like buying a new house and finding you have to replace all the wiring or add insulation behind finished walls - retrofitting is always expensive. It can usually be avoided by thoughtful design and by disclosure. This is a problem manufacturers of this traffic-control equipment should have thought of and dealt with long before they started marketing it. Governments, too, ought to have considered the problem, though (color me skeptical) in my mind I picture some second-level municipal official in a sales presentation being smart enough to ask the question, and getting a run-around answer.
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