Toronto is getting a $577-million street light overhaul
The major upgrade could save the city $6 million each year, according to Toronto Hydro
Mayor Olivia Chow has announced a plan to overhaul the city’s street lights.
Over the next nine years, Chow revealed at a news conference in Scarborough, all street lights in Toronto will be converted to LED lighting. The plan will cost $577 million.
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“Everyone deserves to feel safe in their neighbourhood, particularly at night,” Chow said in a statement. “For too long, the city has taken a reactive approach to streetlighting, addressing outages as they arise rather than investing in long-term solutions. This investment represents a shift toward modernizing our infrastructure with energy-efficient LED lighting, improving visibility across our streets, parks and public spaces. It will strengthen safety in our communities, bring our streetlighting system into a state of good repair and deliver better value for taxpayers through more reliable, cost-effective operations.”
CBC reported that according to Toronto Hydro, 33 per cent of streetlighting assets in the city and 86 per cent of underground infrastructure are “past their useful life.” The city’s news release noted that the kind of street lights Toronto currently uses are no longer manufactured.
In 2005, Toronto sold its streetlighting assets to Toronto Hydro and began a 30-year service agreement. Jana Mosley, president and CEO of Toronto Hydro, said that by the fifth year of the project, 60 per cent of street lights will have been converted. “LED lighting is the global standard. LEDs last two to four times longer than conventional lights,” she said, adding that LED lights reduce energy consumption by 40 per cent.
Mosley said the upgrade could annually save the city $6 million in the long run.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
