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Istanbul Isiklarius traffic lights
- makmanalp 15y agoWow, as an Istanbul native, I'm surprised that the city govt is doing it right by handing design to a design shop. I like how it looks, it's odd and quirky, but I think it somehow fits with the city. For the record, Isik + lar means "lights" (the suffix is a pluralizer), and I'm guessing the "us" is the generic latin name suffix?!
- simanyay 15y agoYes, Artlebedev studio ends most of its products with generic latin name sufix.
- gnubardt 15y agoSince each color is an LED display and can display shapes it'd be cool to use the traffic lights to direct people to detours when a road is closed or over capacity.
- forbes 15y agoQuite a beautiful design but I would question the durability of the wood-veneer model. That finish is generally more suited to interior use and would start to look pretty tatty in a couple of years I expect. That said, I want them for my city immediately.
- umtrey 15y agoAlso, from a design standpoint, the idea of using LEDs is being challenged - while the designer mentions a lack of snow build-up, the traditional lights do a good job of emitting enough heat to melt snow drift: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34436730/ns/us_news-life/t/energy-saving-traffic-lights-blamed-crashes/ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34436730/ns/us_news-life/t/energ... It's not an entirely obvious problem, but one that is being dealt with often in colder climates. Unintended consequences of design.
- makmanalp 15y agoThis is a really good point. To be fair though, Istanbul gets heavy snow maybe a week or two every year. I do agree with the grandparent on the wood veneer though. I guess they tried to make it look more ancient for the old city area.
- Cushman 15y agoThere must be cheaper ways to get rid of snow than incandescent lightbulbs.
- reemrevnivek 15y agoThis doesn't seem immediately obvious to me. Care to explain? Incandescent lightbulbs are a time-proven technology with economies of scale behind them. They generate heat and light, which is what's required here. Seems ideal for the application.
- Cushman 15y agoReally? Even assuming that we absolutely need to heat up the lights to solve this problem, we only need to do it when there is enough snow on the light to be a problem, which means at most only during snowfall, realistically much less frequently than that. Even in New England during winter, you've gotta be talking under 10% of the time that this has to happen. You seriously can't come up with a better way to solve this problem than replacing a very efficient, very robust light source with a very inefficient, very delicate one, secure in the knowledge that as it runs all year round, some tiny fraction of the huge amount of waste heat it generates will go towards melting snow? Although I'll note in your defense that "incandescent lightbulbs" are more accurately described as "heat lamps", and one potential solution might well involve a specialized heat lamp which only activates when the light itself is obstructed.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- docmarionum1 15y agoI was in Istanbul a few months ago and the traffic was the craziest I've ever seen. It didn't really seem like anyone paid attention to the traffic signals anyway. I don't see how a new design would help fix that.
- gst 15y agoI just wanted to post exactly the same. I haven't yet seen any other city with a traffic as bad as in Istanbul: Drivers typically don't care about traffic lights and drive without braking and just honking over pedestrian crossings, even though they have a red light and there are pedestrians on the street. In case of traffic jams drivers just continue driving on the sidewalk. I saw deadlock situations on crossings multiple times a day, because drivers just continued to drive into crossings, even though they had a red light and/or the crossing was blocked. Police does not seem to care at all. I don't see how new traffic lights would change this.
- mda 15y agoI lived in Istanbul for long time. I agree that traffic and some drivers are terrible, It is correct that they don't care about zebra crossings, but drivers obeys traffic lights in general. The main issue is density, too much vehicles, too little roads and everybody is in a hurry. Also Cairo is definitely worse than Istanbul.
- mindcreek 15y agoI think you are talking about somewhere in India or Thailand or something, I drive in Istanbul for the last umm, 12 years and never missed a red light intentionally and saw maybe ten or fifteen idiots that does not care about the red light. Btw did you visit Istanbul in the end of 80's I believe it was the only time The city was packed enough and that situation maybe seen because I can remember those times, now its different though many of the traffic lights have cameras that trigger with a red light pass, even there were accidents the first few months cameras were installed people were braking harder than usual to make sure they stop :) As for deadlocks, Istanbul transport authority changed thousands of streets to one way or changed the rules of many areas to stop that in the last 5 years, when were you last in Istanbul seriously :) ? And police does care, if you are involved in a red light violation and police is around you are not screwed but definitely get a ticket.
- jrockway 15y agoIt's too bad that traffic signals don't make their state available via some sort of radio link. Then we could have cars that provide the driver with an optimal target speed to get through a series of intersections without stopping.
- michaeldhopkins 15y agoThat wouldn't fly with the many cities that depend on traffic tickets for revenue.
- sixtofour 15y agoAre there many cities that don't depend on this non-voter approved tax?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- valjavec 15y agoIngolstadt (city of Audi HQ) had (still has?) this experiment. Cars were getting signal from traffic ligjts and you as a driver got a warning sign like: "drive 30 km/h" to hit green light without stopping.
- dmazin 15y agoSome cities in America have traffic-synchronized streets where a driver going a certain (indicated all along the street) speed should hit the greens every time. The problem one one street I've seen it used for is, the sign is very vague about when this system is active "during peak traffic hours" so I do not know when to go the suggested speed or not.
- ojilles 15y agoPretty common elsewhere in the world too. In the Netherlands they call it the "Green Wave", and marketed as such. I suspect b/c speeding in those area's really doesn't buy you anything. So when traffic is light, they double as a "speed bump" :-)
- gcb 15y agonever liked anything from that studio. but then, i don't like Dyson too... but this proves my point about art lebedev. they got an assignment to redo traffic lights, and just made then square. ...oh, and use the newest led tech buzzword! don't forget the latest led tech buzzword.
- ZoFreX 15y agoIf you read their earlier post on it, the squareness is far from a quirk and actually a very well thought out design decision. Obviously design is a matter of taste, but like them or no, their method is a lot more than just being quirky or using buzzwords.
- gcb 15y agoI'm not disliking based on aesthetics. but because 100% of traffic lights were i live are square. nothing new. also, besides being square, they have sensors in the asphalt that detects cars (and bikes in bike lanes) toadjust for optimum wait time.
- ZoFreX 15y agoWhere do you live? They're all round here (and often barely visible, judging by the number of times I've almost been on the receiving end of a bumper...)
- ahmetalpbalkan 15y agowow some Turkish stuff on HN. nice to see.
- ansgri 15y agoMore Russian than Turkish though. art.lebedev studio is russian.
- afsina 15y agoI think in short time this light colors would go black with exhaust smoke. And as someone who drives in Istanbul some time to time, I think what Istanbul needs is strict control and huge fines. Traffic is full of aggressive *astarts who does not respect any pedestrian or other drivers.
- tchvil 15y agoAs a passenger of a Dolmus(Turkish taxi bus), scared by their driving style, I heard a joke a while ago: "In France, traffic lights are mandatory. In Italy they are optional. In Turkey they are decorative". It looks they took it seriously.
- wizard_2 15y agoI always got a kick out of these buses. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmu%C5%9F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolmu%C5%9F These share taxis depart from the terminal only when a sufficient amount of passengers have boarded, and the name is derived from Turkish for "apparently stuffed" for this reason.
- yread 15y agoCheck out the process page http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/isiklarius/process/ http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/isiklarius/process/ I really like the ones by Ji-youn with a triangle for stop, circle for orange and rectangle for green. You can see some serious effort went into this
- mjs 15y ago"Isiklarius is equipped with a system developed in our studio that detects visually impaired and handicapped pedestrians." How does that work??
- ars 15y agoIt doesn't. This is imagination, not an actual product.
- yaakov34 15y agoWhen it comes to Lebedev's designs, one would do well to reserve judgement until seeing the final result. For example, Lebedev designed bus stops for the city of Perm with tremendous fanfare, see here: http://www.artlebedev.ru/everything/perm/bus-stop/ http://www.artlebedev.ru/everything/perm/bus-stop/ . There were hundreds of press articles about it, which is surely unusual for a bus stop design. It then turned out that the bus stops could not be built with rounded corners with the specified materials (http://pics.livejournal.com/denis_galitsky/pic/000220ap/ http://pics.livejournal.com/denis_galitsky/pic/000220ap/), and that lighting couldn't be connected to most of them, and that the benches are too high and narrow (http://pics.livejournal.com/denis_galitsky/pic/0001h036/ http://pics.livejournal.com/denis_galitsky/pic/0001h036/ - this is called "the Lebedev pose"), and that the flat roofs are inappropriate to the climate and now look like this: http://denis-galitsky.livejournal.com/33098.html http://denis-galitsky.livejournal.com/33098.html . It doesn't help that Artemy Lebedev is a giant, giant douche nozzle - if you read Russian, you can convince yourself of this by browsing his blog.
- jsrn 15y ago"[...] if you read Russian, you can convince yourself of this by browsing his blog." there is an English version of it here: http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/ http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/ which is a translation of http://www.artlebedev.ru/kovodstvo/sections/ http://www.artlebedev.ru/kovodstvo/sections/ (I don't know if this is the blog you were referring to)
- evgenit 15y agoProbably this: http://tema.livejournal.com/ http://tema.livejournal.com/ Com/mandership is much less douchy.
- yaakov34 15y agoNo, that's not it at all - I am referring to his main blog at tema.livejournal.com. It's a profanity-laced display that really needs to be appreciated in the original to be believed. E.g. his response to the bus stop fiasco was along the lines of - I am translating liberally here, and you may want to cover the eyes of any small children reading along with you - that as a designer, his ass doesn't get fucked with this, and it's the builder who takes it up the ass for anything not built to his sketches. That's a pretty original concept of industrial design - all product designers I know follow the product from sketch to engineering drawings to casting molds to the prototype to the production line, to make sure every little squiggle is just right. Now, if he wants to be a sketch artist, as opposed to a product designer, that's fine too, but that's not what he gets hired to do. You may remember the disaster of the "Optimus Maximus" keyboard - this is the $1500 keyboard with LCD displays on all the keys. It ended up being years late and looked nothing like what was promised - he couldn't handle the engineering of placing the LCDs on the keys, so the keys became transparent with the LCDs under them. Now, that was a privately-developed product, but he's done this to paying customers any number of times as well, leaving them with a misdesigned product and late to the market. He then explains in his charming manner (see above) that this is all their fault. He is a fantastic walking self-promotion machine, which is why the studio seems unsinkable despite being kind of lousy in terms of actual product design firepower.
- hackermom 15y agoReading this got me thinking about the sound signal schemes that traffic stop devices - sometimes the lights, sometimes the push button boxes - emit to aid those with visual impairment. The Swedish system is a mechanical ticker placed inside the push button box, like a very loud clock that ticks slowly at one tick about every other second during red/yellow, and then picks up pace to about 7-8 ticks per second during green, cleverly aimed towards the listeners' intuition, telling them to "slow down" and "hurry across". I remember how this even served a good purpose and reminder for me as a kid, when I was too young, too impatient and too reckless to pay attention to the streeth lights - but the loud and clear sound signal and its intuitive meaning never escaped my attention. What's used where you live?
- hnbla 15y agoMight not be a problem in istanbul but with that shape it seems like the light would be clogged up with snow in one day where it snows. Especially since they use LEDs and not light-bulbs that double as ice-melters since so much electricity burns of as heat. There's a reason traditional traffic lights has roof but no floor.