Shorter streetlights are better

The Center City District has been systematically improving lighting for pedestrians in the core of Philadelphia since 1997. “We’re about two-thirds of the way through replacing highway-scale cobrahead light fixtures with shorter, pedestrian-scale street lamps,” says Paul Levy, president of the business improvement district. Roughly 2,100 cobra light fixtures — curving lamps suggestive of snake heads, first produced by Westinghouse in 1957 — have been taken down. Typically standing 28 to 34 feet high, Philadelphia’s cobraheads, like those in other cities, don’t illuminate the sidewalks consistently. Usually the lights are spaced approximately 100 to 120 feet apart, producing pools of brightness alternating with darker areas — an undesirable condition. Trees often prevent some of their illumination from reaching ground level. The Center City organization has replaced cobras with street lamps in a historically-inspired design, which stand about 15 to 16 feet high and are placed about 60 feet apart. This provides a more consistent illumination, which is more comfortable for pedestrians and better for sidewalk safety. “The goal is not brightness; it’s uniformity,” says Levy. Nathaniel Popkin, a perceptive Philadelphia writer on urban life, observed in The City Paper in December 2007 that “replacing cobras with street lamps is like piecing the city back together again a block at a time.” Cobra lights make the city seem “ugly, fragmented and less safe,” Popkin wrote. “The street lamp, on the other hand, designed at human scale, values the life of the sidewalk. … A lamppost has physical and emotional presence.” The city’s Streets Department has agreed to take ownership and maintenance responsibility for all pedestrian light poles that are located along streets narrow enough that those fixtures can illuminate the roadway, and not just the sidewalk. In Philadelphia, where most of the streets are in fact narrow enough to be illuminated by pedestrian-scale fixtures, the Streets Department policy has proven helpful. “Once the Streets Department accepted the pedestrian fixture as the standard, they began to support the installation of these fixtures elsewhere in the city,” Levy points out.