Solar-powered, bus-stop ads arriving in Moncton
Solar-powered advertising on four new bus shelters is expected to save Codiac Transpo money on energy costs says Marie-Claire Pierce, the transit organization's senior transit planner.
The new shelters have been installed by Codiac Transpo on the newly constructed lay-bys on Plaza Boulevard in Moncton.
The shelters will work from dusk to dawn and will be lit 365 days a year.
The solar panels are good for 20 years and the LED lights used for advertising have a minimum life capacity of 50,000 hours.
"We think it's a progressive way in which for us to move so we are not expending dollars on power and we can access solar power to be able to light our shelters up in that location," said Pierce.
Save on power
Pierce said each bus shelter costs $300 a year to light up using grid power.
The two solar panels on each bus shelter cost $5,000. The use of the solar panels will bring down the annual cost for each shelter by $50.
The shelters were provided by a company based in Toronto called Daytech Limited, which has been a provider of bus shelters to cities across North America, including Moncton.
"It's been a long time running in which we needed new construction done in the plaza and we had location there so we built two sets of bus lay-bys on either side of the street. That meant that we needed to purchase new bus shelters," Pierce said.
Dion McGuire, the president of Daytech Limited, said they have several hundred solar-powered installations across Canada and the United States.
The bus shelters were ordered at the beginning of the year. They arrived a couple months ago and were fully functional last week.
