NYPA partners with Signify to connect half a million streetlights for Smart Street Lighting NY

Abebe Woldemariam, street lighting program coordinator for the city of Rochester, describes some of the many benefits of Interact City. “The platform opens up a variety of options for city maintenance and governance,” Woldemariam said. “With Interact City, we can now remotely monitor the system via a central dashboard, identifying required maintenance very quickly. Should any glitch occur, the system pro-actively prompts managers even before our residents have noticed, and that’s a big plus.”

As part of the project, NYPA devised an innovative financing model that offers municipalities low-rate loans for lighting conversions, including the option to buy the physical street lighting assets from local utilities. Signify acts not only as a tech provider, but as a trusted advisor to and strategic partner of both NYPA and participating municipal governments.

“Urbanization, digitalization and sustainability continue to drive key actions associated with Smart City engagement, even in today’s climate. With this in mind, Signify is extremely excited to be partnering with NYPA to support the delivery of our connected lighting systems and to benefit the people in the towns and cities of New York above and beyond pure illumination,” said Martin Stephenson, Head of North Americas Systems & Services, Signify. “Through NYPA and Signify’s shared vision, communities can improve light quality, generate significant energy savings, and improve citizen safety and wellbeing using leading edge technologies.” 

Making cities more livable and safer with a connected infrastructure

While lighting is only one aspect of a total smart city ecosystem, it can lay the groundwork for city-wide connected infrastructure. Once connected streetlights are installed and managed with Interact City, a municipality can add sensors to monitor various aspects of the system and environment, improving urban quality of life and management. By deploying streetlight tilt/vibration and noise sensors on connected streetlights, for example, the city municipality can help protect roads and drivers by rectifying streetlights and poles when they are out of position and identify areas where noise reduction measures are needed. With its open APIs, Interact City can share data collected via sensors with the IT systems of firefighters, emergency medical services, and other first responders, enabling them to react more quickly when incidents occur. In addition, streetlight smart poles like BrightSites, can serve as suitable places on which to hang cellular equipment bundles and host Wi-Fi transmitters for online access or even act as charging stations for electronic vehicles.