A project to improve lighting controls on the streets of Los Angeles has the potential to become an expansive, data-collecting network in the city.
The Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting has been upgrading the city’s streetlights to LED bulbs for years. But the city is also attaching mobile sensors to the devices, enabling them to know what bulbs have burned out. In time, officials will also have the ability to brighten, dim, blink the lights and gather environmental information on an area.
Currently Los Angeles has about 50,000 “smart streetlights” operating in the city, out of its stable of 160,000 LED lamps, according to Ed Ebrahimian, director of the Bureau of Street Lighting. The city plans to upgrade the remaining 110,000 lights with remote monitoring units and smart controls over the next few years.
