SmartBlockPHL Sensor Streetlight Pilot
SmartBlockPHL put 14 sensor-equipped streetlights on a single block of South 13th Street in Center City, installed December 2021, as a partnership between the City's Office of Innovation and Technology, the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability, and private partners Comcast, Juganu and US Ignite. Optical sensors count pedestrians, vehicles and cyclists using local edge computing, storing no video and transmitting only anonymized counts, to test whether such sensors could replace manual traffic counts. Reporting describes the pilot as running through late 2022, and no results report or expansion beyond that single block has surfaced since; as of 2026 the city's own program page still describes it in the present tense, with no clear indication of whether the sensors are still active.
🎓 Lesson
A single-block sensor pilot with no published findings report and no confirmed expansion after three-plus years is a caution about taking a program page's present tense at face value.
📖 Terms in this entry: 15-minute city · Adaptive traffic signals · Digital twin
Sources
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “SmartBlockPHL Sensor Streetlight Pilot” — Philadelphia, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/philadelphia-smartblockphl-sensors/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.