Mayor Emanuel has announced that the City is conducting a public demonstration of next-generation streetlights in seven neighborhoods as part of the Chicago Smart Lighting Project, which will upgrade streetlights across the city. Residents are being asked to provide feedback on the new lighting, which represents the latest advances in lighting technology, through the end of the year.

The Chicago Smart Lighting Project is designed to enhance public safety and quality of life for all Chicagoans by providing better, more reliable outdoor lighting along with speeding up responsiveness to streetlight service requests.

A worker replaces a high-pressure sodium light with LED lights. (Photo courtesy of Chicago Department of Transportation)

The Smart Lighting Project is being led by the Chicago Infrastructure Trust (CIT) in close coordination with the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT). When completed it will be one of the largest LED conversion projects in the country and will create the nation’s largest lighting control network.

This ambitious city-wide lighting modernization initiative will take advantage of advances in lighting technologies to deliver higher quality, more reliable, outdoor lighting by:

• Replacing approximately 270,000 outdated high pressure sodium (HPS) lamps with modern, energy- efficient LED lights.

• Installing a wireless lighting management system that provides real time outage updates, greatly reducing outage response times.

• Making targeted repairs to existing poles and wires, with the goal of extending useful life and reducing failure rates.

Request for Feedback

During December, 2016, before the Chicago Smart Lighting procurement is finalized, the City is conducting demonstrations of the proposed new LED lighting to solicit resident input.

New LED light fixtures have been installed in seven Chicago neighborhoods; on one arterial street, one residential block, and one alley in each area.

Neighborhoods and areas in Chicago to be replaced with LED streetlights.  (Editor's Notice: The headline of this article was changed on Dec. 14, 2016 from Chicago to Replace 270,000 High Pressure Sodium Lights by December to Chicago to Replace 270,000 High Pressure Sodium Lights by 2017.)