In April 2015, Royal Philips announced that the City of Los Angeles will become the first city in the world to control its street lighting through an advanced Philips management system that uses mobile and cloud-based technologies.

While CityTouch is already in use in 31 countries, the LA solution is the first in the world connecting directly to each light point using the Philips CityTouch connector node, which can connect street lights from any manufacturer. This extends the life of legacy and LED systems alike, enabling them to become connected light points. CityTouch gives the Bureau of Street Lighting a clear picture of the entire city’s lighting system at its fingertips, with map-based visualization, charts, and diagrams. The combination of LED technology and management software enable the Bureau to better manage its assets, while Los Angeles benefits from the increased uptime, with safer, well-lit streets.

The 215,000 street lights in Los Angeles include more than 400 different styles distributed across 7,500 miles of roadway. Maintenance has traditionally depended on crews who scout the streets at night to identify outages, as well as calls from citizens. The bureau handles 40,000 such calls per year. They needed to find new technology that could improve customer service, make people feel safer, and create a more livable city.

According to Ed Ebrahimian, director of the Bureau of Street Lighting for the City of Los Angeles, the city has more LED street lights than any other city in America, with about 7,500 centerline miles. This required a solution that would allow them to remotely control street lights and accurately report how much energy each light is consuming, while also being easy to install and flexible enough to adapt to broader Smart City plans. They piloted several solutions over 2014 and decided to implement CityTouch as it required no further investment or intervention in their infrastructure, and it is regarded as the best product at the lowest price.

Connected street lights provide the Bureau of Street Lighting with luminaire health data to increase maintenance planning effectiveness and cost savings. In the future, coupled with grid health information, this aggregated data will enable advanced maintenance models. The city also installed microphones on connected street lights to collect noise data at the street level. Visualization software creates realtime and historical timelines using this data, along with map and list views of code violations and alerts. Such visualizations help the city to maintain code compliance, assess urban policy, and respond adequately to noise complaints. Sharing noise data with the public raises awareness about noise pollution and provides quantitative evidence for the city’s mitigation efforts.