Deep in a KRQE-TV story about the City of Albuquerque’s Route 66-themed signs — including the archways over Central Avenue — is this item — the city eventually will upgrade them to LED.
Apparently neon owned by the city has been experiencing trouble staying lighted for extended periods — to the chagrin of residents and business owners. It’s not cheap to fix them, either — about $25,000 a year.
But here’s the newsworthy excerpt:
It says it hasn’t fixed the one on Central near Coors because it plans to upgrade the sign’s light system.
“The technology has gotten a lot better, so now we are looking at LED which will last a lot longer and actually look a lot better,” said Lozoya.
The city is trying to get funding for the upgraded lighting. If everything works out, the new lights could be installed in the next couple of weeks.
The city plans on upgrading about eight of the ten neon signs along Central.
Expect more of this along the Mother Road in the coming years. Neon lighting does indeed add to Route 66’s nostalgia and allure. But the glass tubing is notoriously fragile and expensive to keep up. The LED lighting provides a double benefit of being energy-efficient and more durable.
The U-Drop Inn in Shamrock, Texas, already has converted from neon to LED lighting in the last couple of years, to no ill effects. The “Yukon’s Best Flour” sign in Yukon, Oklahoma, went through the same conversion.
It’s telling that one of the big advocates for neon lighting a few years ago — I believe it was the Museum of Neon Art — supported the use of LED because it ultimately will allow more historic neon signs to be restored.
Don’t get me wrong — I’m not advocating for everyone to swap out neon for LEDs. But in the case of dealing with signs that are exposed to wind, water and rain, making the conversion probably will make a lot of sense. And LED technology keeps getting better every day.
(Screen capture from KRQE-TV’s report about the Albuquerque Route 66 archway)
This sounds similar to conversion from film to digital images. At first digital images were not recognized nor allowed in photo contests. Neon and LED have a similar transition.
There’s a big difference between “LED technology is getting better” and “LED technology will capture the essence of Neon”.
It won’t.
The fact remains, , it took 7 months of us reporting the outage. No one ever gave this explanation until it was brought to the medias attention! Seems that’s the only way to get them into gear!!
“actually look a lot better,”
Uh… no.
Just to add to my short comment…
Living in Las Vegas, it’s clear that LED doesn’t come close to looking as good as neon. There is almost no neon left on the Strip in Vegas. It’s sad and much less interesting.