Beyond illumination: the new ROI of streetlighting for modern cities

SmartCitiesWorld (SCW): How can cities move beyond energy savings to unlock wider cross-departmental value from smart streetlighting infrastructure?

Chris Lucero (CL): Smart streetlighting creates a citywide network of connected, powered nodes that support applications beyond illumination, including the potential for traffic monitoring, air quality sensing, and public wifi.

The breadth of possible applications enabled through smart streetlighting mean that multiple city departments can benefit simultaneously. Police can gain improved situational awareness, public works can receive real-time maintenance alerts, and economic development can be supported as a result of greater connectivity for commercial districts.

Naturally, successful implementation requires collaborative planning that identifies these shared needs before deployment, ensuring the infrastructure supports multiple use cases rather than serving a single department’s goals. Regional digital twin technology can help cities to better plan, simulate, and optimise smart lighting layouts and locations based on analytics.

Data minimisation and edge computing ensure cities collect only necessary information and process it locally when possible, reducing privacy risks while maintaining functionality

By creating digital maps of cities, planners can see the bigger picture with layers of services such as lighting, emergency evacuation routing, and traffic flow being viewed together.

Artificial intelligence is also good at detecting patterns in data. Good placement of smart streetlighting poles helps city IT personnel collect data such as vehicle and foot traffic, temperature, shade, and heat exposure, as well as safety video.  Once collected, data can be formatted, scrubbed, and presented with valuable insights to help cities operate efficiently.

SCW: What does a privacy-by-design approach look like in practice when deploying sensor-enabled streetlighting?

CL: Privacy protection begins with thorough impact assessments that determine what data to collect, how to store it, and who can access it, with different approaches for presence sensors versus cameras. Many countries have privacy policies that require the obscuration of citizens’ images.

Data minimisation and edge computing ensure cities collect only necessary information and process it locally when possible, reducing privacy risks while maintaining functionality. Appropriate removal of data once its purpose has expired, per data privacy policies, is crucial.

This is especially important at a time where sensing is increasing and improving constantly, with IoT sensors now in the form of everything from thermostats to air quality sensors, from AI-based cameras to “3D microphones” that can triangulate on sounds.

Beyond technological measures, transparent communication about what sensors monitor and how data benefits residents builds community trust, supported by strong governance, including oversight committees and regular security audits.

SCW: What funding strategies are proving most effective for cities looking to modernise their streetlighting at scale?

CL: Energy performance contracts finance upgrades through guaranteed future savings – demonstrated by Phoenix’s 53 per cent reduction in electricity costs, saving $3.5m annually.

Federal grants and public-private partnerships can also distribute costs and risk while accelerating deployment, with technology providers sometimes subsidising infrastructure in exchange for data access.

Beyond technological measures, transparent communication about what sensors monitor and how data benefits residents builds community trust

There are also revenue-generating models that create new income streams through services like 5G small cell hosting, EV charging integration, or digital services, allowing cities to expand capabilities beyond the initial investment. Smaller solar panels can also be installed on streetlight poles to power the various devices needed for these services. This approach would allow the city to save on electricity costs while improving services and would ultimately pay for itself.

Connectivity also benefits from good streetlight locations. Arranging both cellular, wi-fi, and other wireless communication hubs can keep citizens connected to information and entertainment. In addition, peer-to-peer and peer-to-network communication will grow as smarter vehicles are produced. Imagine a not-too-distant future where smart EVs communicate with city infrastructure via smart lighting poles, enquiring as to parking availability, location, and codes, as well as building information, letting visitors know where their destination is and operating hours.

SCW: How should cities think about integrating smart lighting with their existing systems while still preparing for future technologies?

CL: Open architecture and standards-based approaches maintain vendor independence and ensure different technologies communicate effectively with existing municipal systems.

Investing in systems with modular design also enables incremental upgrades without complete system overhauls, allowing cities to add capabilities as needs evolve and budgets allow.

Technology roadmaps, with both short- and long-term strategies, should align smart lighting investments with broader strategic goals. This ensures deployments support long-term community priorities rather than pursuing technology for its own sake. Flexibility is key here; even the best of plans need to be examined and, in some cases, make pivots based on actual deployment results and community reception. Cities need feedback from their most valuable resource – their citizens. They will tell you if you’ve hit a home run or just swung and missed.

As technology evolves, advanced IoT sensors are beginning to enable Quantum-based sensing. This will create richer data to act on, and contribute to larger, aggregate insights for city CIOs to learn from in the near future. The smart streetlight will be the hub for all of these emerging technologies, and many more.

SCW: What methods or frameworks can help cities calculate the true ROI of smart lighting investments, including social and operational benefits?

CL: Comprehensive ROI analysis captures direct financial benefits, including energy savings, reduced maintenance costs, and operational efficiencies through remote monitoring and predictive maintenance.

Operational and public safety improvements manifest in reduced response times for outages, decreased staff hours for inspections, crime reduction in well-lit areas, and enhanced emergency response capabilities. Quality-of-life and environmental benefits appear in resident satisfaction surveys, increased commercial district vitality, reduced carbon emissions, and decreased light pollution, all contributing to the total value proposition.

Cities need feedback from their most valuable resource – their citizens. They will tell you if you’ve hit a home run or just swung and missed

Predictive maintenance is another key element in a city’s operational planning.  Unforeseen downtime from a broken device (or water pump) can disrupt the normal flow of an essential roadway or building. By monitoring these devices through the use of sensors, a city operations officer can stay on top of the status of critical infrastructure and schedule planned outages at a more convenient time, or create alternate routes to bypass construction zones.

Individually, there is nothing really new about these proposed technologies and solutions; however, by intelligent design and integration, with all of these “smart modules” added together, the results are amplified to create a dramatic improvement in a city’s illumination, connectivity, sensing, and security.