Dark streets are dangerous. Seattle City Light has responded to last year's revelations about a massive backlog of burned-out streetlights with a new plan for a brighter future on Seattle streets. Capitol Hill's LED streetlight tests, it turns out, are part of the city department's solution:
We have heard your concerns and have moved quickly to address problem streetlights. In fact, there are three major efforts underway to ensure that our neighborhoods have fully functioning lights. It’s a safety issue that needs to be addressed and it is our mission to ensure that turn-around times on repair are less than 10 days, keeping burned out streetlights to a minimum..
In 2009, the City Council’s Energy and Technology Committee looked at the pressing need for City Light to get caught up on repairing or replacing non-functioning streetlights. At one point in early 2009, as many as 8,000 streetlights were out of service and, at the time, it was estimated it could take anywhere from six to nine months to get necessary repairs made. That was unacceptable.
As a result, the Council acted to swiftly provide the funds needed to speed up the work. Today, we are caught up on the backlog. However, on any given day, we will receive between 50 – 100 streetlight reports. So there are still lamps in the queue that need work. Right now, it takes less than 10 days to fix a reported streetlight that’s out. If the repair will take longer than that, City Light notifies the customer of the delay, including what the problem with the light is and how long it will take to fix.
The second part of the answer to streetlight maintenance is a four-year “re-lamping cycle.” What this means is City Light has split its service territory into four sectors and is re-lamping every streetlight in a sector in one year. In the first year, 2008, City Light re-lamped its southern-most service area, replacing about 20,000 lamps. In 2009, they re-lamped the rest of the area south of Denny Way. We found some 1,300 streetlights that required more work than simply replacing the lamp. These are lights that weren’t reported to us previously by customers. That backlog has been reduced to a less than two hundred that are waiting for additional parts in order to complete the repairs.
This year, City Light will move north of Denny to 65th; and in 2011, the rest of the service territory north of 65th will be completed. The process is designed to start again in 2012.
But there is more good news to share. Simultaneously with the stepped-up maintenance work, the Council has approved City Light’s acceptance of federal stimulus dollars to invest in a program that would replace the existing high pressure sodium (HPS) lights with brighter, longer-lasting light emitting diode (LED) lights. Initially, 5,000 LED streetlights will be installed. Eventually, all of the 80,000 streetlights will be replaced.
