From a Guest Blogger: Street Lights Get an Eco-Friendly Upgrade

Good news for the city of Detroit: The streetlights may soon come back on. Towards the end of 2012, only around half of the approximately 88,000 street lamps in the city were functioning. (To put that number in perspective, there are around 55,000 total street lamps in Portland.)

A lack of illumination can impact the safety of drivers and pedestrians. Many business owners and residents in Detroit have expressed concern that the lack of working streetlights is contributing to an increase in street crime and gang activities. Faulty streetlights can also lower perceptions of an area—if the streetlights are malfunctioning and neighborhoods go dark at night, then property values may drop.

But Detroit is not alone. Copper wire theft has left more and more streets darkened around the country in recent years. In Sacramento, copper thieves have vandalized
approximately 18,800 streetlights in 150 neighborhoods since 2010. (Fortunately, most of them have now been restored.) Thieves target the control boxes for the lights, which contain the wires. The control boxes are being made more secure as a result.

Street lighting is also making news overseas: In Paris, the City of Light, the French government is proposing to simply turn off streetlights throughout the country between 1am and 7am as a cost-saving measure.

Seattle is also planning on reducing their electricity bills—but without plunging the city streets into darkness. Instead, they are switching from sodium vapor lights to LED
lights in around 44,000 street lamps, which they estimate could save them as much as $2.4 million a year—or more—while keeping the streets and sidewalks illuminated and citizens safe at night. And Seattle isn’t alone in this pioneering effort: San Francisco, Vancouver, B.C., Portland, and Los Angeles are testing and installing them as well.

LED lights last considerably longer than traditional sodium vapor lights and are much more energy efficient. They are touted as a more eco-friendly way to save the city money on electricity bills without increasing safety concerns.

Street lights require ongoing maintenance, be it repair or simple upkeep. If you live in Portland and you notice a street light outage or any other issues with street lights such as vandalism, you can call the Street Light Outage Hotline at 503-865-LAMP (5267) to report it. (If you notice a problem with a traffic signal, call 503-823-1700.)