[jcrawfordor]

I wrote an article about this almost a year and a half ago, and I was wondering how it's held up. I think Scientific American is remiss in not digging a bit deeper, because to me one of the main parts of this story is a commercial phenomenon - street lighting in the US is pretty monopolized, almost all municipal street lights and a good portion of area lights are made by the same company (Acuity). That makes it a lot less surprising that they would exhibit a similar failure around the same time.

Acuity has acknowledged a phosphor defect in their lights and had launched a major warranty repair campaign, but I'm not sure how well that's gone given that new failures are still occurring. At least a year ago, they were struggling with the scale of the problem: it just takes a long time to schedule replacement of failed fixtures when there are so many of them.