On the Bridge Project, there are two types of nighttime lighting: street level lights for the roadway to enable safe driving when it gets dark and architectural lights to illuiminate the bridge structure for decorative purposes. The street lights were operational when the bridge opened to traffic on October 5. The architectural lights have been installed and will be tested over three nights next week: Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Wednesday is off due to the Veterans Day holiday.
The architectural lights will illuminate the cable-stays and towers in different colors. During testing, you may see individual lights, cable-stays and portions of the towers lit in the primary LED colors of red, green, blue, and white (the combination of all three colors). There are more than 120 light fixtures for the cable-stays, as some of the longer ones require two lights for complete coverage, and 36 lights on each tower (72 total).
Each of the light fixtures must be tested for directional accuracy and coverage, then groups of them that are on a single circuit will be tested. Eventually, depending on what time of night you travel over the bridge, you may catch a glimpse of all the lights on at the same time.
During testing, you may even see one or two color-combination presets appear. When fully functioning, the bridge lighting system will display different color combinations for different occasions. However, those types of displays will take weeks to program in the system for the more than 190 lights on the bridge. Stay tuned for more updates on when the bridge lights will become fully operational.
