This project was presented as part of the Public Interest Technology Lightning Talk session at NYC School of Data 2024 — a community conference that demystifies the policies and practices around open data, technology, and service design. The conference concluded NYC’s Open Data Week and featured 30+ sessions organized by the city’s civic technology, data, and design community.

New York City is globally coined as the city that never sleeps. And, yet, its nightscapes are not designed to be comfortable, safe, and hospital to all New Yorkers. In turn, there is an opportunity to explore the significance of nighttime and electric lighting design in fostering infrastructure, health, and environmental equity in public spaces. Beyond emphasizing safety and aesthetics, the project underscores the crucial role of lighting design in creating inclusive urban environments and enhancing social experiences. Positioned as a case study methodology, this report seeks to posit a potential approach to neighborhood- based urban lighting measurement and analysis, designed for ease of replication and scalability.

Problem Statement

The primary challenge lies in the absence of comprehensive public or open data detailing the full spectrum of street lighting assets in New York City, including privately owned installations. Additionally, varied sources of illumination, such as commercial storefronts, informal lamps, vehicle headlights, and traffic lights, complicate the accurate measurement of lighting conditions. This challenge hampers the identification of infrastructural gaps and opportunities for intervention. Furthermore, the limited conceptualization of the relationship between lighting design and public health in urban planning practice results in a lack of practical analyses and collaboration across city agencies. Notably, the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) does not measure ambient lighting in their installations. Moreover, recent investments, such as the $1.5 million commercial district lighting grant from the NYC Small Business Services (SBS), had neglected to enquire about the applicant's intended approaches to analyzing existing urban conditions during site selection processes.

Opportunity

Given the absence of publicly-owned streetlight asset data, the central inquiry revolves around leveraging existing publicly accessible datasets to identify neighborhoods with lighting intervention opportunities. Additionally, there may be a further opportunity to complement existing data on incidental lighting with data on permanent lighting collected through primary field surveys to establish more comprehensive and contextually specific correlations that can inform decision-making to advance lighting equity and public wellness outcomes.