Research and Development of Distribution of Pro-beam Light on Street in the Urban Area

Abstract

The visibility of the pedestrian by conventional road lighting is known to depend on the relationship between the driver’s position and the pedestrian’s position. Pro-beam road lighting is a foundational solution for enhancing the visibility of pedestrians crossing the road. In the present study, we developed a proposed pro-beam luminaire that uses existing LED lamps and is designed to adjust the pro-beam road lighting distribution to achieve an ideal distribution. The visibility performance of the proposed pro-beam road lighting was evaluated by 16 young participants seated in a car on a test track. A field experiment found the visibility performance of the proposed pro-beam lighting in the longitudinal direction of the road to be higher than that of conventional road lighting. In addition, the present study revealed that vertical illuminance at the height of 0.8m strongly correlates with the average subjective visibility value. According to this relationship, two light distributions for the pro-beam road lighting were examined to improve the weaknesses of the proposed pro-beam road lighting.