I have seen the same thing happen as part of Portsmouth PFI. Columns moved from one side of the road to the other on more than 1 occasion and in another case a 8m column planted and then removed and replaced with a 6m one.

And do the hokey-cokey and turn around?  

You wonder what's going through the minds of the contractors when they do things like this. Sometimes you feel like you're seeing things. Bit OT but on a similar theme - round my way an access road was blocked off to traffic by means of a new section of fencing and a gate for pedestrian access last February. When I went past a couple of weeks later the road had been reopened and the fencing removed. Now they are beginning work on fencing the road off again! The mind boggles...  

How odd.   Some contractors here have installed a new Iridium on a new road at the back of the pavement, then a metre along a new column has been installed but closer to the road, with no lantern yet. All rather weird. I say UKASTLE members should manage street lights. Even if that means that more people die from car crashes due to 12m concrete columns being installed.  

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"I used to rule the world... Now I sweep the streets I used to own."
Remembering GEC.

Maybe they are replacing the Iridium installation because they realised it looked cr*p!  

Or maybe the new column isn't a lighting column at all! Sometimes mobile phone masts are disguised as lighting columns or even modern telegraph poles look a bit like lighting columns. Just an idea...



Well I would install Stanton 6B columns (those really big hefty ones) but install them at the back of the pavement so they were safer and then put on a big, dock-off arched bracket on the top to light the road with from further back!   Now that would look good!  

And I have one too!
This is from Station Road/Queen Street area of York - on the curve where the road is elevated near the rail station (the road is actually on a bridge that used to have the old LNER railway go under it to the old rail station within the city walls). After some work around the rail station, a cycle lane was painted onto the road on the outbound side of the road (away from the city and station) and the white line for traffic lanes moved across a bit. Two weeks later this cycle lane had been erased and repainted onto the citybound side of the road, and the white line moved across the other way! two weeks later, guess what??!! The cycle lane was back in it's original position!!!    


If I was running street lighting, most main roads would be catenary lit with specially made 80w PL-L lanterns... with the odd 'adapted' urbis ZX3 or holophane QSM as a joke!! I'd have one road fitted with big arched finned stanton columns though...

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I think these contractors have been playing too many games like Rollercoaster Tycoon, where you can just click on things to move them about whenever you feel like it! Well that's fine on a computer game but you can't move things about like that in real life, you have to get it right the first time because it costs us taxpayers a lot of money otherwise!  

I think the view is "so what if it costs the taxpayer more?". Actually, they don't have that view, they're just ignorant of where the pot of money comes from.

I have seen my first 55w PL-L Altras in Hampshire. There is some sort of replacement scheme going on along the southern end of Hunts Pond Road in Titchfield Common. Yes, a replacement scheme even though there is a PFI due to start within the next couple of months. And when I say replacement scheme, I mean a number of columns are being replaced, whilst a number of the existing late 1970s/early 1980s columns are being fitted with new lanterns, with little logic. A full on replacement scheme I could understand, but only replacing a proportion of columns even though all of the columns in the road are old enough to warrant replacement under the PFI? Does that mean that the PFI will have to return to the road and replace the rest of the columns, but that the lanterns will be reused or something? Mind boggling. Pleasing and excellent lighting levels from the 55w PL-L Altras anyway. Makes me wonder why we bother with the likes of 70w metal halide or 60w Cosmopolis when 55w PL-L is so effective.

Maybe some of the columns are structurally unsound and have to be replaced by necessity. As this would mean new lanterns being fitted to the new columns the council probably thought they would fit the new lanterns to the old columns which are sound to maintain uniformity of lighting and save money on installing all new columns. When the PFI starts the intention probably is that the Altras on the old columns will be refitted to the new ones although whether the contractors will use their brains and do this or blindly bin the current Altras with the old columns and fit more new Altras (or Sapphires or something else which isn't an Altra) when they don't have to. My guess is that the latter will happen  

Slightly off-region, but it would be nice if Colchester would just consider installing any sort of white light source! Even, dare I mention them, the 18-LED Stelas in Dunstable produced a half-decent white light when I saw them (equivalent to 80w mercury perhaps, but without the 'spill' onto gardens and houses). Colchester became a white light-free zone when the last few 80w mercuries were replaced with 70w SON a few years ago. Since that historic day, the occasional 'new' white light has been installed here and there, but many of their locations are so sporadic and unfathomable that it looks like they only came about after an ordering error.