San Diego’s installation of 3,200 smart streetlights is slightly behind schedule, but the city has already ordered more
San Diego’s network of smart streetlights, which has been rolling out since early 2018, continues to grow. To date, some 2,000 of the sensor-laden devices have begun gathering pictures, sounds, and other data.
So far, the city has focused on the image data, using it to count pedestrians and cars as they move around the city. This data is only just starting to feed into the way the city designs and manages traffic flows, and any consumer applications remain far in the future, says Erik Caldwell, the city of San Diego’s interim deputy chief operating officer for smart and sustainable communities. Officials are still talking through all other possible applications, such as using the streetlights to locate gunshots, track airport noise, or monitor air quality.
But the city is already fond enough of the sensor-laden lamps that it has placed an order with manufacturer Current by GE for an additional 1,000. Meanwhile, the initial 3,200 streetlights will finish being installed in the next month or two.
The rollout has fallen a bit behind schedule, admits Caldwell. As of last October, the city expected most of the network to be complete in May 2018. But Caldwell says that the original deadline was aspirational, and he isn’t too dismayed by the current pace of installation.
And the streetlights installed to date have given the city plenty of data to work with.
Says Caldwell of a recent test examining whether the streetlights could identify open parking spaces, “We just completed a pilot demonstration project benchmarking the system against parking meters with built-in sensors, against parking transaction data, and against an intern with a clipboard. We found that the streetlights provide the best information.”
With the accuracy of parking data verified, Caldwell says, the city is now preparing to take action on that information. “We thought we were using spaces 60 percent of the time,” he said, “but data we from the streetlights says we are using them 90 percent, which is overutilized. So we are thinking about pricing, whether we should have more parking in certain areas, whether we should expand the metered network.”
The city is also getting ready to use the parking data to help people find a parking space. “We’ve had a couple of pilot applications built,” he says, “but haven’t launched a consumer-facing version yet.”
More useful to city planners than parking will be what Caldwell calls “mobility” data—information on how people and vehicles move through the city.
Right now, he says, the city uses traffic flow models to determine where to place stop signs, stop lights, and one-way streets, as well as how to time traffic signals. Those models currently base their analysis on the number of people living and working in particular areas as well as the number of vehicles registered to addresses in those areas.
“What is revolutionary is to have near real-time information about how people are moving,” Caldwell says. “That gives us the ability to see things we haven’t seen before. We can look at a baseball game at Petco Park downtown, and see how that affects people’s ability to move through the environment. We can see how a law enforcement event, like a traffic stop, impedes the ability to move.”...MORE
