Arizona Cities Leverage Smart Lighting to Save Money, Boost Safety & Build Trust

Aerial View of Phoenix

One of the most practical places to begin your new smart city journey is with an oft overlooked asset right over your nose: streetlights. For cities looking to plan or expand their smart city strategy, streetlights represent one of the largest infrastructure networks in the city that comes prebuilt, wired and ready for deployment. 

But beyond the basic function of illuminating our way, these poles form an important backbone for smart city technologies. And they can also deliver an immediate return on investment (ROI). From data gathering and public safety, to environmental monitoring and boosting community engagement, streetlights are a. important infrastructure for a cities digital goals. 

When cities emphasize the importance of citizen trust and privacy by design in smart lighting developments, they can serve as both a quick win through reduced energy and maintenance costs, as well as providing a strong foundation for long-term innovation. The kind of innovation that enables long-term digital transformation across city planning. 

Light Poles as Catalysts for Smarter Communities

While smart lighting isn’t just about optimizing lightbulbs, it is a great first step. Beyond just-in-time energy use, smart lighting can be the foundation for broader smart city growth with built-in real estate that lends itself to expanding smart city technology and capabilities. 

Because most Internet of Things (IoT) devices require some kind of housing capabilities, smart cities don’t need to undertake massive infrastructure to implement new sensor capabilities throughout the city. Existing light poles (there are more than 99,600 in the City of Phoenix alone) can integrate additional functions and capability that enhance the structures already there.

As The Connective's smart lighting technology provider Ubicquia reports, by 2025, cities will deploy more than 2 billion devices in urban areas to improve public safety, environmental concerns and connectivity. While for some cities, smart lighting is old news, for others, it’s a potent opportunity for technology acceleration and strategic scaling towards a smarter, more effective urban community – when thoughtful strategy and proper precautions are implemented.

Already, all City of Phoenix street lights are LED bulbs. We’ve also seen smart lighting benefits in places like the Town of Fountain Hills, where smart lighting in Fountain Hills Plaza has increased foot traffic, improved resident sentiment, and increased energy efficiency. 

How Smart Streetlights Promote ROI for Cities

Implementing smart streetlights is a great way to generate revenue for other smart city and community initiatives while simultaneously setting the groundwork to do so. With existing infrastructure already in place, there’s potential for a high ROI with minimal incremental costs amd a long tail of opportunity.  

First, to fund smart streetlight projects, there are several models for securing funding. These include federal grants, performance contracts with smart streetlight providers, and public-private partnerships with enterprises that help fund infrastructure projects.

Once projects are funded, cities can start to see both financial and environmental savings, in areas like energy use, maintenance and operations. In the City of Phoenix, for example, converting streetlights to LEDs reduced electricity costs by ~53%, resulting in a savings of $3.5 million a year. These savings free up budgets to reinvest in community priorities.

With many cities experiencing shrinking budgets, it’s imperative to accelerate known solutions with vetted results that allow cities to reduce expenses. For cities with a “save money to spend money” mindset, smart light poles are a great place to start. 

Beyond Illumination: Multi-Purpose Infrastructure

With smart sensor technology, smart light poles can become service platforms for residents. Some of the smart technology features existing light poles can take on include:

• Internet/Wi-Fi connectivity

• Video cameras for road conditions, traffic and security monitoring, including license plate recognition

• Air quality sensors

• Noise sensors

• Temperature/humidity sensors

• Information monitors

• Pedestrian counts

• Emergency callboxes
  

With functionality this diverse, smart light poles provide cross-departmental value. Local government departments including public works, utilities, law enforcement and planning can all benefit from smart light pole functionality. 

Data gathering and knowledge-sharing can happen immediately. While using existing infrastructure reduces cost to implement smart light poles, deployment is also quick and seamless to integrate. For smart cities looking for ROI, as well as enhanced safety and security through smart city technologies, light poles provide myriad advantages as a smart city consideration.

What Smart Light Poles Mean for Residents

Beyond city benefits, smart light poles help make communities safer and more enjoyable to live in. Smart light poles can provide residential benefits including:

• Increased safety: Light poles that adjust brightness based on movement and foot traffic mean more illumination when residents need it. This can deter crime and promote safety in neighborhoods and in cities.

• Faster outage repairs: When light poles are malfunctioning, they can instantly send alerts to repair workers, which results in faster repairs and less downtime.

• Smoother traffic: Smart traffic light poles can adjust traffic signals based on volume and pedestrian presence, resulting in smarter traffic signals. 

• Improved connectivity: Wi-Fi hotspot integration improves high-speed internet connectivity for more residents and can help cities improve delivery of city-specific communications about things like public services to residents.

• Clearer air and better heat mitigation: As smart light poles gather data about air pollution, heat and humidity, and other environmental factors, city planners can create environmental solutions that benefit residents exactly where they need them.

Communicating the benefits and ensuring privacy by design can help get citizens buy in early and generate resident engagement upfront. The benefits this critical foundation provides to long term smart city capabilities is there but it’s not always obvious to the average resident and working with them from the get go can help avoid problems down the road. A secondary benefit of that resident involvement is identifying immediate needs and integrating easy to implement solutions early on that significantly increase trust and the potential for long term success. 

Building Trust & Future Readiness for Smart Light Poles in Arizona

Smart light poles are a great stepping stone toward broader Arizona smart city strategic urban technology. Integrating technology into existing infrastructure helps transform cities with a smaller up-front financial requirement while opening up the future of other smart city capabilities, which can lead to transformations in public safety, climate resilience, emergency response and other areas that impact constituents.

The keys to long-term success in smart lighting technology, like any smart city development, are transparency and communication. Making citizens aware of new developments can increase buy-in and ensure your program’s a success. But by doing so, we see how Arizona cities are leading in ways that deliver ROI, improve public safety, and support environmental goals, while maintaining citizen trust. As The Connective helps cities vet vendors, evaluate ROI of potential strategies, and design to increase trust among residents, we see opportunity in expanding our smart city foundations that enrich and deepen future solutions.