A lot of cities are planning on replacing their city lights in the coming years with the LED lights and intelligent controls. It is a great example of ambition and growing scale of the outdoor street lighting designs.This very initiative can even help in saving millions every year in the energy costs. When a city grows, it faces a lot of challenges- social, economic and environmental. These challenges grow along with the city. However, cities are hubs of innovation and diversity. They can also become the source of answers with the new technology energy saving led lights.

Why public lighting is important?

Public lighting is installed in all the places- where people work, live, paly and travel. Their main function is to give quality and energy saving light and enhance the public safety while improving the urban landscape.

Street furniture

Street furniture and street lights are doing a lot more than ever before in the smart cities of today’s time. With embedded sensors and digital networks, they gather and transmit the info which aids the cities in monitoring and responding to all kinds of circumstances from air quality, to traffic to noise and crowds. They can also detect the track available parking spaces and traffic congestion. These same networks are also capable of remotely controlling the LED lights to turn off and on, dim, flash etc. which offers the cities a chance of maximizing low-energy lighting advantages along with improvement in the safety of bicyclists and pedestrians. With the LED decorative lighting creating a network canopy, those data networks can be used in more than only the lighting departments, empowering the businesses and even schools through a lighting infrastructure which brightens the future of digital cities.

decorative lanterns

Streetlights and its advantages

Nonetheless, a number of cities may also be missing out on the strategic potential of the linked streetlights. The concept of using the streetlight networks as the vehicle for other smart city apps is already quite established in a few countries and enables them to monitor the air quality and managing the connected waste bins. This is not really surprising because the streetlights are a perfect base for the sensors in a lot of ways:

  1. They accurately map the populations – where the people congregate to work, live, travel or play, there is already a variety of streetlights.
  2. They give a set of fixed data points unlike the crowd-sourced data from the mobile applications; streetlight sensors provide reliable reference point data.
  3. They give powers to the sensors- again with no batteries to worry about. Even the high powered devices such as the video cameras can be installed for running unattended for a number of years.
  4. They are secure and safe- high above the ground. The streetlights are protected against the vandalism and pose no safety hazard to the citizens.

The most important and the major thing which is missing for the streetlights to be the ideal base foe smart city sensors is the absence of data connection.