Smart Streetlights
Lighting the Way To Cleaner Air
The City of Pittsburgh maintains 40,000 streetlights on more than 2,400 lane miles of city, state, and county-owned roadways. SmartPGH will allow for LED conversion of up to 36,365 of them. In addition to LED technology, the streetlights will include integrated control systems and sensor technology with pedestrian detection and air quality monitoring capability.
In addition to providing substantial annual operating and maintenance savings, a smart LED system will increase pedestrian safety and well-being. Sensor infrastructure can also be used for a mesh network of public WiFi, which would help give more people access to technology.
The sensor technology deployed throughout the most heavily traveled corridors will provide data that can integrate with The Scalable Urban Traffic Control program (Surtrac) to further optimize traffic flows. This traffic detection will identify significant traffic origins and destinations located between signalized intersections and not being detected by Surtrac. This can help minimize the impact of a high traffic event. For example, traffic leaving a parking garage at the end of a concert can have a significant impact on traffic at surrounding intersections. Sensors mounted on streetlights would be able to collect this data and communicate it to the controllers at surrounding intersections to optimize traffic flow.
We’ll also use wireless sensor deployment to monitor local air quality. We can collect real-time local ambient air levels of CO, CO2, NO2, SO2, O3, and PM2.5 to better understand geospatial air quality ‘hot spots.’ We can also measure the success of SmartPGH initiatives in reducing emissions.