The Chicago Smart Lighting Program

About the city. Chicago is undertaking one of the largest street lighting modernization programs in the United States. The program will enhance the quality of life for all Chicagoans by providing better, more reliable lighting along with improving responsiveness to streetlight service requests.

Goal

The City of Chicago is installing better quality, more reliable LED light fixtures on streets, alleys and viaducts to increase safety, reduce energy costs and improve the environment.

Implementation period. The program of street lighting modernization has been started in 2017; Chicago city is planning to complete the program by 2021

Fact

By modernising Chicago’s streetlights, the city is improving night-time visibility, creating new jobs and saving taxpayers more than $100m over the next decade.

Moreover, before the program started, most of the City’s streetlights were High-Pressure Sodium (HPS) lights, which is an outdated technology. LED lights are now the industry standard because they provide better light quality, last two or three times longer and are more cost and energy effective.

Solutions

The city-wide lighting initiative will replace over 270,000 existing outdated High Pressure Sodium (HPS) light fixtures with new energy-efficient LED lights which in many ways more beneficial and create a modern lighting management system to streamline maintenance and repairs:

• The Chicago Smart Lighting Program creates one of the largest lighting control and management systems in the country: every new light fixture will be connected to a larger network, allowing the City to monitor and address maintenance issues. Instead of relying on residents to call 311 to report issues, the lighting management system will notify the City if there is an outage and a crew from the Chicago Department of Transportation can be dispatched to look into issues more quickly.
• The new LED lights also last two to three times as long as the existing High Pressure Sodium lights. The Chicago Smart Lighting Program also includes limited repairs to existing poles and wiring which will improve overall system reliability.
• The program is actively replacing poles and cables in poor condition. Crews have upgraded 85 poles and 52,000 feet of cable in South and West Side priority areas. Work orders have been issued for full lighting system replacements on 357 viaducts, 207 blocks of arterial streets and 135 blocks of residential streets around the city.

Challenges

Some researchers believe the brightness of Chicago’s new LED’s can adversely affect residents’ health, local wildlife, and even crime rates. WBEZ investigated the issue for an episode of Curious City and found out that some of the concerns about the level of blue spectrum light were warranted.

While the new lights do use more blue light, the city sought the guidance of experts from the U.S. Department of Energy, the American Medical Association, and the Illuminating Engineering Society to determine a safe colour temperature.

Team

The City’s public lighting infrastructure is owned by the City of Chicago and maintained by the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT)

Timeline

From January through August 2020, the City is continuing the installation of the new light fixtures in the Far North, Northwest, North, South, Southwest and Far Southeast sides. Nowadays more than 192,000 LED lights have been installed. Upon completion of the Chicago Smart Lighting Program, approximately 270,000 LED lights will have replaced the old High-Pressure Sodium fixtures across the entire city.

The newly installed fixtures have already saved the City over 70 million kilowatt-hours of energy, equivalent to $3.4 million.

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