News

The small changes made to a town’s streets are often barely noticed by local people, although some of them are very important.

This is the case with traffic lights, for example. It is very doubtful that many people are aware of the changes that have been made to the ones in Sagunto. The lights themselves will soon be changed to take advantage of the latest technologies, and even the image we have become used to is about to be updated.

The local authority in the capital of the Camp de Morvedre areas has started to replace the old lamps for new LED-type lights, which will mean major energy savings can be made.

The new lights use only 10% of the power consumed by incandescent lamps, while providing 30% more light and much improved sharpness.

Second phase

A few days ago the Council ended the first phase of implementing these new technologies, replacing the tops of the traffic lights, before moving on to the second phase as soon as the funding is made available by the central government.

This replacement is part of the Strategic Energy Saving and Efficiency Action Plan announced by the Spanish government last July, with plans to replace 15% of the country’s 300,000 traffic lights with LED-based traffic lights.

A nod to equal opportunities

But this is not going to be the only new development affecting the town’s traffic lights. The other, which is even more striking, is related to the image that the screen will now show. For the first time in Sagunto the traditional green and red “walk” and “don’t walk” figures at pedestrian crossings will soon be female rather than the traditional male ones.

This original initiative will be implemented within the next six months, as part of the same project as fitting the LED traffic lights, thereby taking advantage of the State funding on offer. The new signs will be applied to the traffic lights along the busy Avenida 9 d’Octubre.

Jose Luis Martí, the councillor for urban mobility, explained: “The idea came up at a meeting we had with the technicians from SICE, the contractors for the project. The proposed it as an interesting innovation and we liked the idea very much.”

He went on, “We found it rather amusing, but it also serves to standardise the image of women in certain places, like traffic lights. Why shouldn’t it be a woman instead of always a man? The ideal situation would be that nobody even noticed which sex was being represented. There shouldn’t be any difference or any discrimination.”

Sagunto is the only town in the Valencia Region to have adopted the new symbols, and only the second in Spain. Getafe, near Madrid, also recently added them to its urban landscape.