The Universe of Discourse

Reflector grids

Around here, these metal things are commonly found on streetside utility poles, attached maybe a meter off the ground.

Metal reflector

Plastic reflector

When I first noticed one of these I said “I wonder what the holes are for. Maybe to make it more visible? And what do they do with all the leftover rectangles after they've made one?”

I eventually got a better idea: The little metal rectangles are the primary product, and after they have been die-cut out of the metal sheet, there is this waste material left over with all the holes. Instead of throwing it away someone nails it to a utility pole to make the pole easier to see at night. I felt a bit silly that my first idea had been exactly backwards.

I later learned that only the older ones are made of sheet metal. Newer ones are made of some sort of plastic, maybe polyethylene or vinyl or something, about the same thickness. They look pretty much the same. I can only tell them apart by feeling them.

Still I wondered what the little rectangles had been used for. It turns out that the purpose is this:

That's according to an old Philadelphia Inquirer article, Why yellow grids are on some Philly-area utility poles. (Patricia Madej, Aug. 31, 2019.) But I measured them to make sure. They matched.

The answer came as a bit of a surprise to Jay Lipschutz, 73, of Northeast Philly …

His wife, Ruth, he said, had insisted they’re reflectors for drivers to see. She was right.

Jay, my friend, your wife is smarter than you are. Listen to her.

The article also tells us that the rectangular leftover is called a “grid reflector”. With a little more research I learned that one manufacturer of grid reflectors is Almetek. They cost $3.50 each. Pricey, for something they would have had to throw away. (Here's the old South Philly Review article that put me on to Almetek.)

What kicked off this article was that I was walking around and I saw this similar reflector grid, which felt to me like it was a bit of a farce, like a teenager sneaking into a bar wearing a fake mustache:

Hey, those aren't holes! When I saw this one I wondered for a moment if I was suffering some sort of mental collapse, or if none of the others had had real holes either. But no, they had, and this one really did have fake holes.

(Also, it has been installed sideways. Normally they are oriented as the two above.)

This isn't the first time I have written about ID numbers on utility poles hereabouts.

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