Birmingham, UK
M6 Toll
The client required an upgrade of the existing road lighting at each toll plaza situated on the M6 Toll motorway. The brief was to improve the lighting at the six toll booth sections with LED lighting, improving visibility of the toll booth lane, booth access and signage. Utilising LED technology within the scheme to reduce maintenance at the plaza intersections and disruption to road users was key to the project vision. CU Phosco offered the groundbreaking P860 highway lantern for the road lighting and a specialist floodlighting uplighter for the gantry sign lighting.
The existing HID road scheme used 4 x 250W Son floodlights mounted at varied heights/positions from outreach brackets on 15m columns. The new design replaced these four floodlights with a single post top mounted P860 highway lantern.
The gantry lighting was originally provided via 400W Son HID floodlights up lighting the toll booth signs across the road infrastructure at varied positions. The concept was to create a bespoke product from the CU Phosco range to replace these with an LED light source.
Results & Benefits
The performance of the high powered P860 highway lantern at 479W provided excellent uniformity and vision across the extensive lanes at the toll booths. This reduced the weight and column stresses on the existing asset structure and reduced significant visual clutter. From the column factory CU Phosco provided a replacement steel post top adapter for the existing columns to allow the lantern to be mounted onto the roadside. Exchanging HID to LED reduced energy on the roadway by 60%.
The new design for the gantry lighting replaced each existing floodlight position with a specially designed FL800R LED floodlight at 301W. The LED modules were re-designed in a bespoke canopy to align the modules to up light the signs from the toll booth roof, housing the driver compartment on the base of the canopy. Exchanging HID to LED reduced energy on the gantries by 33%.
The change to an LED white light source dramatically improves the clarity of the blue motorway signs due to the compatibility of these colour sources within the light spectrum
