Light When It’s Needed: A Demand-Based Streetlighting Pilot for the Houston–Galveston Region

1. The problem

Across Galveston, Texas City, La Marque and Houston, residents see streetlights burning in broad daylight, sometimes a whole row of freeway high-mast lights. Most lights run on fixed timers or photocells with no fault reporting. When a photocell or contactor fails, the light often stays on; many controls are designed to fail “on” for safety. Nobody notices unless a resident reports it.

Reporting is hard. The utility’s online map asks for a street address or pole number. Pole numbers are often missing or worn off, and large I-45 posts may have none at all. After a report is filed, residents can’t see its status. One stakeholder reported the same lights twice and they were still on years later.

2. What the data shows

From the City of Houston’s own 311 service-request layer (loading…), for the case types “Lighting” and “Traffic Bridge/Freeway Lighting”:

Method: computed in the browser from the ArcGIS layer HOUSTON311_RECENT_SR_SNOW (live when reachable, otherwise a saved snapshot). The layer holds open cases plus recently closed ones, so it under-counts closed cases. We therefore report how old the open cases are, not a fix rate. It covers Houston only. It does not include reports made directly to CenterPoint, which is why a shared tracker matters.

What one day-burner costs. A light that stays on through daylight wastes energy for every daylight hour. Using NOAA sunrise/sunset equations for Houston (… daylight hours per year) and placeholder assumptions ($0.12/kWh, 0.37 kg CO₂/kWh):

These are illustrative estimates, not measurements. Many municipal streetlights are unmetered and billed at a flat per-fixture rate. In that case, day-burning wastes energy and adds emissions across the system, but it may not show up on the city’s bill, and dimming saves the city money only if the tariff credits it. The pilot should confirm the billing arrangement in each participating city.

3. Recommendations

R1. Day-burner sweep: photocell audit & replacement

• Crews or contractors check the pilot area in daylight at the start and end of the pilot. Resident reports fill in the gaps.
• Replace failed photocells and contactors. Where fixtures are already being converted to LED, pair each conversion with a control that can report faults.
• Record each fix with a timestamp so the public tracker closes automatically.

R2. Adaptive, weather-aware dimming (residential streets first)

• Dusk to about 10 PM, and 5 AM to dawn: full output while streets are busiest.
• Late night on low-traffic residential streets: dim to about 50%, or to the level local standards and the engineer of record set.
• Cloudy and stormy days: the control switches on based on measured light levels, not the clock. When a daytime storm makes it dark enough, lights come on at partial output instead of full brightness. Dense fog and heavy rain can trigger full output.
• Always full brightness: intersections, crosswalks, school zones, transit stops, high-crash corridors, and hurricane evacuation routes during an event.
• Adaptive controls commonly reduce streetlight energy use substantially. The pilot will measure the actual savings here instead of assuming them.

R3. Networked controllers on freeway high-mast and major arterials

Fit high-mast clusters (e.g., the I-45 corridor, coordinated with TxDOT) and major arterials with networked nodes. The nodes report on/off state, power draw and faults, so a day-burner is flagged automatically within a day and nobody has to find a pole number. These are the highest-wattage fixtures and the hardest for residents to report, so each fault found here saves the most.

R4. Resident reporting with public status and response targets

• Accept reports with GPS coordinates and an optional photo. No pole number required. Nearby reports are merged, so repeat sightings add up to an evidence trail and don’t count as duplicates.
• Every report gets a public status page: Reported → Sent → Acknowledged → Fixed, or Still on if a resident sees it lit again.
• Targets to agree with the utility, for example: acknowledge within 3 business days and fix within 14 days. Cases that miss the target are escalated to the council office, and monthly performance is published as open data.
• The utility publishes its streetlight inventory (location, fixture type, wattage, control type) so reports match the right asset and waste estimates use real wattages.

4. 90-day pilot design

5. Why this is ready now

The resident-facing tool already exists as a working prototype. It supports reporting without a pole number, an automatic daylight check, duplicate merging with +1 confirmations, public status pages, and a transparent waste calculator. The pilot needs a shared database, a status data feed from the utility, and an agreement on response targets. No new hardware is needed to start phase one.

All dollar and energy figures on this page come from stated assumptions and public data. The pilot’s job is to replace them with measured values.