So, you’re taking on a huge lighting project on a busy motorway or highway that witnesses significant amounts of traffic every day. You know the stakes are high and want to ensure you meet every technical requirement whilst ensuring road-user safety. How can we help you?

Getting on the road to success

Strategic infrastructure projects (any large-scale work completed on major roads, rail networks or transport interchanges) are much more complicated and require far more coordination than your usual lighting installation.

Whether you’re revamping an existing set of lights or grappling with entirely new sections of road or railway, your installation must meet the strictest of technical requirements — something that requires expertise. This is where DFL comes in.

Put us in the driving seat

Whilst we love a creative project as much as the next lighting consultant, our teams have spent years working on complex highway lighting installations and have the knowledge required to tick every single document and report off your to-do list.

For instance, to ensure your strategic infrastructure project’s up to scratch, we’ll ensure your highway lighting scheme complies with recommendations outlined in key lighting guidelines, including:

BS 5489-1:2020 — Design of road lighting: Lighting of roads and public amenity areas.
Code of Practice — The Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB).
TD 501 — Road lighting design.

Compliance with these standards ensures that motorway lighting projects meet both legal obligations and operational performance targets.

Whilst also bearing in mind the following factors:

Traffic volume and speed
Road geometry (e.g., curves, junctions, gradients)
Environmental surroundings (urban vs rural)
Energy usage and sustainability
Maintenance and long-term lifecycle cost

We’re also around to provide any design-related support such as Programme Management, where needed, even if it doesn’t fall into the usual lighting consultant’s remit.

Our teams are well-positioned to support larger organisations with their strategic infrastructure development plans, having supported numerous revamps and from-scratch schemes for National Highways and Transport for London (TfL). And we’d love to help with your upcoming project!

We'd love to show you one of our projects, so click here for a 5 minute read and some spectacular drone footage of the project in action Upgrades for the M2 Junction 5

Questions and Answers

What is the primary UK standard for motorway lighting?

The primary UK standard for highway lighting is BS EN 13201-2 – Performance requirements which is supplemented by BS 5489-1:2020 Code of practice for the design of road lighting.

BS 5489 provides the practical guidance and application for implementing road lighting designs in accordance with the performance standards set by BS EN 13201.

The Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB) also supplements BS EN 13201 and provides National Highways specific guidance for implementing lighting on the trunk road network.

Do all motorways require full lighting coverage?

Not necessarily. Lighting is typically installed at high-risk locations such as junctions, interchanges, and busy urban sections. Rural motorways may use partial or adaptive lighting to balance safety with energy savings.

What types of luminaires are used on UK motorways today?

LED luminaires are the current standard due to their long lifespan, energy efficiency, and ability to support smart lighting systems. They replace older sodium or halide lights.

We are also seeing a trend to changing lighting columns to Aluminium instead of steel. This is to help with the “circular economy”, where the lifecycle and carbon footprint of a product is also considered and helps to minimise waste by using materials that can be recycled.