A1 cats eyes not!

knightstyle

So last night I drove from London up the A1(M) and A1, Great clear road but it was very noticeable that on the well lit motorway bits the cats eyes were bright and all working. Then on the unlit A1 loads were not working especially on the bends, very dangerous!
Edit, just looked to report it and you have to work out which county the not working ones are in!!
Where can I report this?

smashingyour...

They've probably been turned off to save money.

Joe_Horner

It's not money saving, they've installed solar powered ones to save the planet. Sadly, the batteries only last for about an hour after sunset

facade

cats eyes, as invented by Percy Shaw (good for a pub quiz question) are reflective, and contain glass lenses, they need no power source, and the really clever thing was that when run over, the rubber centre deformed and cleaned the lenses.


They always worked really well in The Olden Days, but they don't seem to be about very much nowadays. There was some accident caused by the usual lack of road maintenance when one came loose a few years ago.

Maybe in these PC times they are being removed???

forgotmyname

Switch your headlights on?

ILW

Please leave well alone, otherwise there will be years of hold ups in roadworks whilst they repair the things.

smashingyour...

ILW wrote: »

Please leave well alone, otherwise there will be years of hold ups in roadworks whilst they repair the things.

Especially if they can't find the break in the power cable, they'll have to dig it up all the way back to London.;)

flang

99.9% of cat eyes are just reflectors and are not powered.

Jamie_Carter

Have you tried the Highways Agency website?

This is a link to their contact page: http://www.highways.gov.uk/about-us/contact-us/

atrixblue.-MFR-.

i love how people think they are powered by underground cables!.

i used to work at a place that moulded the housings for them for our council, a plastics company , they are simply a bulletshaped glass bead yelllow green white green etc, they have to reflect at a certain angle or would fail QC as they tend to dazzle if the aim was too high.

ps we made about 10.000 a year thats what the company was contracted for untill the council decided to import them from EU when the budget cuts started back when blair was in charge. we also made solar panel street lights as a project for our council that run in the base of the lamp and without external power going in only out (the hope was to resel the power not used in the lamp back to the grid), that went T1Ts up when the batteries only last 5-6 hours in weather weve just had and about as bright as failing torch bulb, they invested 100's of thousends into that project, the company went belly up in my first year of employment we lost allot of contracts to offshore EU companies.

vaio

atrixblue.-MFR-. wrote: »

.......they are simply a bulletshaped glass bead yelllow green white green etc......

There are also some that actually emit light rather then just reflecting.

I'm guessing they are solar powered. We had some installed local near a tree the local youth kept driving into & killing themselves.

Sadly the local youth fancied them and they got dug up, council replaced them & they got dug up a again so council replaced them with the traditional reflector type