My Neighborhood’s Street Lights Are Always On
I often see street lights on during the daytime. It usually turns out the city’s street lighting department is checking to see which lights are burned out.
After weeks of observation at different times I’ve confirmed most of the street lights in my neighborhood, Columbus Square, are always on. Always.
At home we try to conserve electricity as much as possible, we’ve switched our lighting to LED. Many dimmable so we use even less electricity. To reduce our carbon footprint we also switched to 50% wind-generated credits.
The city, however, has thousands of streetlights of different types. Only some are LED.
I have no idea how street lights are controlled, I assume each area is controlled manually at boxes (buried or above ground), not a centralized computer. It’s possible they’re unaware if lights are always on — unless someone lets them know. I’ll be sending this post to the Citizens’ Service Bureau via Twitter.
Every photo in this post, except the last, was taken on Tuesday April 9th. This first group in a 10-minute window between 10:08am and 10:18am.
This next group were also taken on Tuesday April 9th, between 2:11pm and 2:40pm.
I didn’t go down 11th or Hadley to check lights on those streets, I’d seen enough to know this wasn’t an isolated block or two.
Ironically, I can’t figure out how to turn on the new looking lights on the tennis courts.
Lighting is important, but 24/7 street lighting is just highly wasteful. Hopefully the city will get this addressed so we have streetlights only at night.
— Steve Patterson