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Efficiency and pedestrian safety increase with street lighting upgrade

There's a dramatic aerial photo, more or less taken above Boundary Road – the dividing line between Burnaby and Vancouver – that underlines just how much the City of Burnaby is committed to LED lighting.

Just about everything to the left in the 2022 image shows Vancouver streets lit by the yellow-orange hue of high-pressure sodium lighting. In stark contrast, Burnaby is awash in cool bluish white LEDs, the product of a rollout to convert 11,600 street lights to LED lighting in 2019. Not to be outdone, Vancouver is now in the process of playing catch-up, replacing 44,000 street lights to LEDs by 2026.

The City of Burnaby, meanwhile, continues to roll out the LEDs, including a massive project to swap in energy-efficient LEDs for pathway lighting. The most common are 54-watt NXT side- or top-mounted LED, used extensively on major pathways such as the Central Valley Greenway near Burnaby Lake and the Byrne Lake Urban Trail. Higher-powered 92-watt NXT LEDs are used along the likes of Deer Lake Avenue between Sperling Avenue and Kensington Avenue.

One of the benefits of the NXT lights is that they're a modular design that allows for easier upgrades as LED technologies progress, with replacement of light engines, power supplies and surge modules done without tools in less than a minute. They also save a lot in energy costs.

Add it all up and the savings from the conversion of 1,570 pathway lights total 523,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year.

"The City has been replacing all the street lights for years now, converting from older, less-efficient technologies," says David Salsberg, the City of Burnaby's energy management coordinator. "The pathway lighting also improves the quality of the lighting and the safety of pedestrians. They can see better with the LEDs, and at least one study shows that in parking lots, people feel much safer when the light is whiter."

There are other benefits to a switch to LEDs. Energy is saved in part because, in contrast to high-pressure sodium lamps, there's no need to activate instant-on LEDs before dusk to account for a warm-up period to full illumination. Another is longevity, as the 50,000 to 100,000-hour life expectancy of the LEDs is at least twice that of high-pressure sodium lamps.

BC Hydro converted 90,000 street lights to LED

BC  Hydro supplies power to about 350,000 street lights across B.C., and we're responsible for maintaining street lights attached to our poles on public property. Street lights not attached to our poles typically belong to the local municipality, city, regional district, Ministry of Transportation, Indigenous Nation or nearby commercial property owner.

We own and maintain over 90,000 street lights attached to our poles located across the province. And we replaced those with energy-efficient LEDs in part to ensure compliance with federal regulations that require all light ballasts containing Poly-Chlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) be removed by the end of 2025.

We started replacing lights in the first communities in early 2020 and completed the replacement in all communities in late 2023. In addition to lasting longer and being more efficient, the LEDS improve public safety in communities while also helping reduce light pollution.