How come highway street lamps do not stay lit and "blink off" unexpectedly?

Question

A friend of mine asked me this when visiting the northeast. I still have not found an answer as to why some pole lights along the highway tend to stop working when the rest are lit as you are driving along. Are they getting overheated, or is there some other explanation?

Answer 1

Look, the ET's not love static lights, they love blinking lights and always, when they are near our Planet, they use their incredible possibilities of transforming of energy and impulses to turn highway lighters in "flashing mode"...hahahahaha. Good joke ha? Problem is in oscillations of voltage of the current supply and this "blinking" lamps, when voltage is low, always tryin' to switch ON but because of insufficient voltage they switch OFF. Veradisca & Best Regards, Neven.

Answer 2

The lights have a sensor that detects daylight and it may not be adjusted just right and when the head lights of a car hit it just right it will trip it off.

Answer 3

The deal is that these are not normal lights. They are high-voltage bulbs pressurized with exotic gases like Halogen, Argon, Mercury vapor, Xenon, or other weird gases that need to be heated to give off light, and as such each one require transformers, relays, timers, sensors, and other circuitry to make them work. These circuits can fail due to temperature variances, voltage variances, loose connections, failed components, or the light itself can fail. Because they are so complicated and have many components, there is a much greater chance for failure than there is in a simple table lamp you have in your house, which stops working usually only if the bulb fails.

Answer 4

Seems like I read somewhere that those lights turn off and on all the time to save energy, but I could only find this on wikipedia

At the end of life, many types of high-intensity discharge lamps exhibit a phenomenon known as cycling. These lamps can be started at a relatively low voltage but as they heat up during operation, the internal gas pressure within the arc tube rises and more and more voltage is required to maintain the arc discharge. As a lamp gets older, the maintaining voltage for the arc eventually rises to exceed the voltage provided by the electrical ballast. As the lamp heats to this point, the arc fails and the lamp goes out. Eventually, with the arc extinguished, the lamp cools down again, the gas pressure in the arc tube is reduced, and the ballast can once again cause the arc to strike. The effect of this is that the lamp glows for a while and then goes out, repeatedly.