Philly Streetlight Improvement Project (Citywide LED + Lighting Management System)
The Philly Streetlight Improvement Project, built 2023-2025 by the Philadelphia Energy Authority (a municipal authority) and contractor Ameresco under a Pennsylvania Guaranteed Energy Savings Act performance contract, replaced roughly 130,000 city-owned streetlights with LEDs on a single networked Lighting Management System that reports outages instantly and lets the city dim or brighten fixtures remotely. Unlike Washington D.C.'s and Sao Paulo's streetlight upgrades, which used revenue-sharing public-private concessions, Philadelphia's is repaid from projected energy savings of about $5.4 million a year through the authority, not from advertising or utility revenue-sharing. A University of Pennsylvania Criminology & Public Policy study of the first 34,374 lights installed (Aug 2023-May 2024, across 13,275 blocks) found a 21% drop in outdoor nighttime gun violence, a 20% drop in violent crime and a 16% drop in property crime relative to not-yet-upgraded blocks.
📊 Impact
34,374 of ~130,000 streetlights upgraded Aug 2023-May 2024 across 13,275 blocks were linked to a 21% reduction in outdoor nighttime gun violence, a 20% reduction in violent crime, and a 16% reduction in property crime versus not-yet-upgraded blocks (MacDonald et al., Criminology & Public Policy, 2026, peer-reviewed); the full citywide conversion, completed 2025, is projected to cut streetlighting energy use by more than half and save $5.4M/year.
🎓 Lesson
The financing structure is the real point of difference from comparable entries: a state-authorized energy-savings performance contract through a municipal authority, not a revenue-sharing concession — and the first citywide streetlight upgrade in the atlas with a peer-reviewed causal crime estimate rather than a self-reported one.
📖 Terms in this entry: Adaptive traffic signals · Digital twin · LoRaWAN
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). “Philly Streetlight Improvement Project (Citywide LED + Lighting Management System)” — Philadelphia, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/philadelphia-streetlight-led-lms/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.