The Senate of City Council Facilities and Transportation for the day Thursday, January 8th,

or next time is 4 o'clock.

And will you please take care of it?

Council Member Esedillo?

Present.

Can you repeat that?

Sorry.

Present.

Council Member Fultz, absent.

Mayor Gonzalez?

Present.

and then that will be a speech for the public health center.

After each agenda itemized for some of the mayor

will ask for the meeting of the comments

and then take public comments.

If you'd like to speak directly to the comment,

please copy the speaker card and submit it

to the clerk before the itemized for it.

Members of the public will have 10 minutes

to share their comments.

So as I've been having to hold common

on items there in the amount of time

I'm part of China and South Korea.

I'm still impressed with that kind of

on sexual change.

So we can speak with us.

No superpowers.

Opposed, hold the comment.

We will move to our discussion by default to today, item 3A,

Streetlight, and the senior executive co-cast.

We are here to present this plan.

Please proceed.

Good afternoon, Mayor.

Go ahead.

Red is good.

Good afternoon, Mayor, committee members.

City Manager, staff, and members of the public, my name is Nicole Castellino and I'm senior

here in the Public Works Department.

I'm here to provide you with an overview of our street lighting system.

The presentation includes going through the basics, San Diego's existing conditions, and

potential improvements to our street lighting system.

The goals of our presentation are to establish a vocabulary relating to our lighting, infrastructure,

explain why the system and requests are complex and detail costs associated with

owning and operating your system and costs associated with making improvements

to the existing system. We'll start with the basics. By definition a city street

light is an outdoor light installed along the public street to improve

nighttime visibility. The two depicted in this picture here are most common that we have here

in San Leandro. Starting with street lighting only. As is seen in this picture on Hesperian

Boulevard, we have the majority of street lighting that falls in San Leandro. The sidewalk is not part

of the light spread, as you'll see in the picture on the top.

It casts light over the roadway.

It's focused on illuminating vehicle travel lanes and is not effective in lighting the sidewalk.

The next type is street and pedestrian lighting, as is seen in this example on Stanley Triple

Boulevard near the BART station.

This is used in areas with high volumes of pedestrians and creates a more visually comfortable

pedestrian environment.

You'll see there are two luminaires, one lighting the roadway as was shown in the previous slide

and one lighting the sidewalk and the parking strip.

Pedestrian lighting only as is shown on this example on West Wauna Avenue.

This type of lighting is pretty uncommon but creates a pedestrian-centric environment.

It reduces light trespass and recording and progress neighboring properties and it differentiates

various types of neighborhoods.

The light is only intended to light the sidewalk and the parking strip, not the roadway.

Next we have intersection or safety lighting which focuses on critical conflict points

between various users of the roadway.

Vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, wherever they may merge, diverge, cross, that's what

safety lighting focuses on, illuminating those spots.

They have different standards than streetlights and are typically on metered electricity.

Moving on to the components of a streetlight, we have the photocell at the top.

We'll get into each of these in later slides.

We have the luminaire or the light.

We have the luminaire arm, which extends over the roadway.

We have the pole, the foundation which supports the pole underground.

A pole box if the light is fed from underground.

That's where all the wiring is housed.

And then of importance is this pole number here.

Each pole in the city of San Leandro has a unique number.

If there's a particular light that is in question, it's very helpful that the pole number be provided.

so we can attend to those requests.

Luminaire types.

In San Leandro, we have two types of lights.

We have high-pressure sodium, which, as you can see in this picture,

the light goes everywhere.

It kind of looks like the sun in this picture.

It's a very orange and yellow light, which creates for poor color visibility.

What that means is different colors all appear kind of brownish from a distance, and that can impact safety and awareness.

They also have a shorter lifespan of 15,000 to 20,000 hours, which requires more frequent maintenance.

The city transitioned to LED luminaires in 2014, which are these light-emitting diode bulbs.

They have white light, which creates better visibility.

They have a longer lifespan of 50,000 hours.

And they're directional, which means all the light is focused down towards the ground.

So you get kind of more bang for your buck as far as lighting the roadway.

Electrical and power are streetlights here in San Antonio are fed by either underground

or overhead.

Underground, all the conduits are housed in this pool box.

They're more frequently seen in newer neighborhoods.

They create less visual clutter.

However, they do make it easier for wire theft.

The overhead, as seen in this picture, have more than just street lights on the poles.

And so if a pole is hit, other services are impacted, whether that's electricity, cable,

telephone, and they're more common in our older neighborhoods.

They are less expensive to install, but they don't look as clean.

I'm going to hand this slide to John Angel, Public Works Traffic Supervisor for a quick demonstration.

Good afternoon.

This is the photocell.

The photocell is a small light-sensing device.

It sits on top of the streetlight, and basically what it does is when the sun comes up, it turns off the light.

When the sun goes down, it turns off the light.

Moving on to our existing conditions.

The history of streetlights in San Leandro has evolved over time.

The types have varied, however, the types have varied by neighborhood, however, infrastructure

was in place for, as you can see, for quite some time now.

1903, we already had street lights before 1903.

However, in 1903, there were gas lights.

Gas lighting was replaced with electric-powered lighting.

In 1920, you can see this is similar to what we still have.

It's not completely gone.

And that's along Washington Avenue.

Between 1958 and 1960, this is roughly downtown here in San Leandro.

this building still exists. And you can see that these lights were in place and the main

thing to focus on here is that the focus was on cars and illuminating the roadway.

The City of San Leandro's Public Works Department owns and operates 5,348

streetlights and Caltrans has 87. There are a number of different pole types. The

majority in 2,950 are wood poles shared with other utilities as I mentioned

telephone, cable, and electricity. 1,763 metal or standard poles are streetlight

only we have 395 decorative poles 89 combination poles which are the

pedestrian lighting and street lighting and then 13 concrete poles as you can

see on this map the vast majority are wood and those are mostly in our

residential neighborhoods our main thoroughfares are the green dots mostly

city poles. And the purple dots are mostly along Davis, so there are some on East 14th

and Doolittle and over here near the Washington Interchange. Those are CalChance poles.

Our typical spacing on some of our main thoroughfares, Bancroft Avenue, measured out to be

100 to 150 feet. East 14th Street, 100 to 125 feet. St. Langeville Boulevard, 110 feet

to 200 feet, Davis Street 150 feet to 200 feet, and then our residential is 300 feet max.

So kind of diving deeper onto the residential spacing, the city follows a 1969 city internal

design policy which stipulated an installation on every other pole with approximately 300 feet

between streetlights. So on this graphic you can see the poles depicted in black

are wood poles with no streetlight and the ones with the light bulb are the

poles with the streetlight. You can kind of see they're not always the same

spacing but they do fall within our 300 foot max guideline.

We have various standards and guidelines that are published at different timings.

Federal Highway Administration was published in 1978 and suggests a 150-foot to 250-foot spacing

but focuses on vehicle safety and roadway elimination.

The American National Standard Institute has a spacing suggested of 158 feet to 300 feet, but focuses on visibility and uniformity.

And finally, the Global Designing Cities Initiative has a spacing of 80 feet to 150 feet, but is focusing most on pedestrian comfort and placemaking.

There's no federal law for jurisdictions, but cities can create their own policies.

These are frequently referred to documents, but were developed long after our city was built and our infrastructure was in place, which limits how much we can do cost effectively now.

The next few slides will be presented by Traffic Supervisor John Angel.

So, the topic of funding, the Public Works annual maintenance budget is $1.5 million.

40% of that is spent on street lights, that's maintenance, repairs, replacements, knockdowns.

60% of that is spent fixing traffic signals.

The funding covers the electrical costs, like I said, knockdowns and repairs, parts and

materials.

The funding is not used for new installations because we do not have a new installation budget.

Staffing levels of the public works for the traffic section. We have two electricians, or traffic control technicians, and the maintenance supervisor.

It shows here that one works on traffic signals and the other works on streetlights, but they both share the responsibility of working on both aspects.

aspects. Service requests, we get requests for lights not working, we get requests for

the lights being too dark near people's homes, we get a lot of requests for poles being knocked

down during vehicle collisions and accidents, and we also get requests for crime and vandalism.

Typically we get between 100 and 150 requests per year for service.

service requests the reports come in because people say the lights are out the lights could

be out because we don't have any power the power is a pg&a issue like we said vandalism that means

someone came and stole the wires out there's no longer electricity getting to our light heads

or it's just a faulty light and the luminary needs to be replaced

knockdowns obviously that's a car that hit it or a truck that ran head over we have to go out we

to repair and replace not only the luminaire but we have to replace the mast arm and the actual pole

itself. People call in and complain that it's too dark. We go out and we investigate. We have an

actual meter that can test the lumens of the lights. We determine if the light is actually functioning

correctly. After we determine if it's functioning correctly we look around and we see things. Is

there a tree blocking it? Is there something else that's in the way? Did something, someone's balloon

or a bag fly up and hit it and block the light.

When we figure that out, we request

to either have the trees trimmed by our

urban forestry department or

repair the light.

Private vandalism, once again,

we get out there, we see like in the picture

that was up there earlier, the box is open,

the hand hole on the light, the light

holes open, and the wire is in the room now.

Let me talk to improvements.

We have a few options

when we agree lighting is insufficient or doesn't meet our design deadline.

One of those options is to extend the luminaire arm. Rough cost of that is $2600. It does

create a bit of an uneven lighting situation because we do tend to lose light over the sidewalk

or create very bright spots. We could also install a brighter luminaire which costs roughly $2000.

but it does increase glare, light trespass, and creates a situation of higher energy use.

Next, we could install a new luminaire on a wood pole, costing roughly $10,000.

This takes an extremely long time as there is utility coordination required,

and not all poles can accept a luminaire.

If there's already substantial infrastructure on a whole, PG&E or other utilities will tell us it just cannot sustain anymore.

And finally, installing a new metal streetlight costs roughly $25,000.

There are high upfront costs.

There are construction impacts.

There's ongoing C&M costs.

And there are right-of-way constraints.

that brings me to the end of our presentation.

This presentation is for information only,

but I'm happy to answer any questions at this time.

So thank you for your presentations.

I'm going to take public comment on this side.

I'm going to make public comment.

I did not receive any public comments.

Okay, so we'll close public comment.

I'm going to come back to committee members

for questions or comments.

Okay, yeah.

Thank you Nicole for your presentation.

I have a couple questions.

One of them is the pressure sodium lights to the LED.

What's the ratio of lights that are left that haven't been replaced?

Or how many pressure sodium lights do we have left in the city?

I can touch on that.

We have less than five high pressure sodium lights left in the city.

The rest have all been converted to LED.

Okay. The only complaint I've got about the lights, about the pressure sodium and LED,

I guess the pressure sodium, they spread through a wider area where there was lit up.

The LED lights, it's concentrated to a smaller area, but it's more brighter.

I don't know if that's what I've heard, but the lights are real bright.

The light spread for both should be equal because the high pressure sodium bulb is round,

round and so it emits light in all directions there's a reflector inside the hood of that which

directs the light where it wants to go the leds are directional actually send the light

in the direction and it lands where it's supposed to land so you shouldn't have that much of a

difference it could be a lumen difference that the high pressure sodium was a higher wattage and it

produced higher lumens and now the led isn't producing as much lumen footage that shouldn't

be the case okay okay and the wood poles where it mentions the wood poles it says pg e so do they

own the poles and do we pay rent to them or how does that work or we just share it pg e owns the

poles we pay a fee to even get the process started to put a light on their pole once they've granted

us access to the pole then we own the light we own the fixture we own the mass arm they own the wires

that go down to our light, but we do not pay a fee after that.

We don't pay electrical costs for each light.

Okay, and that's all I have.

Oh, the other one is, can we go back to the slide where it shows the old lights,

like in 1920, 1903, I think it was in 1958.

Okay, what lights were those in 1958 and 1960?

You mentioned a little bit, you didn't say, do you know what kind of lights those are?

I was just wondering, how bright were those ones?

Those most likely would have been incandescent bulbs,

like your old-style light bulbs.

I'm not sure what the wattages would have been.

Okay, that's all my questions. Thank you.

A couple questions around the lighting of intersections.

One intersection that I have in mind,

particularly is on your image of West Kwana and Washington.

I forget where that was.

where you were pedestrian only at that exact intersection.

Very dark.

I'm curious if we have considered how dark that intersection is,

and if so, have we given some thought to what we could do to brighten it?

So, I'm not really familiar why streetlights were left off of this block,

My curiosity really is about the intersection.

Because the roadway, my idea is cars, modern cars have fairly bright lighting, and in theory

people shouldn't be crossing in the middle of the weatherway.

From a safety perspective, I do get concerned about dark crosswalks.

crosswalks. And then when I think about just over the years of living in San Diego, where

if I had the most near misses, it's in dark crosswalks. And I personally had one here

maybe not even a year or two ago at night, where I thought I was fully visible, but then

upon reflection, I was like, well, no, I wasn't fully visible because it's pitch black.

So safety lighting wouldn't really be applicable at this intersection because there's no signal at this intersection.

However, during my lifetime, there was a signal at this intersection many, many years ago.

And maybe it was removed when the signal was removed.

Yes.

Sorry to write down my cases.

Write down my cases.

Good afternoon, Chief of Public Works Director.

I just wanted to add that we did recognize the darkness for the street a few years ago.

We submitted an application to the CTC for some pedestrian improvements for this corridor.

We did believe it was competitive because of the number of pedestrians connecting to the BART

station and it's also considered one of the high entry network however at that time we weren't

awarded a project

approximately how long ago was that i believe i could look back i'm just curious like five years

within the last five years since i've been here so for me i think that just the person i bring

this intersection on this because I know this intersection.

I was there as recently as like two or three nights ago

and I was like, wow, it really is dark.

And then it made me wonder,

knowing because I reviewed this presentation,

what are those other intersections in the city

that are relatively more well-traveled

because of the activity that we have

that would be subject to potential improvements?

I don't come at you with any kind of solution.

One giant street light that has a big arrow over the middle light, I have no idea.

It's obviously aesthetically pretty the way that those lights are laid out.

But functionally, setting aside the aesthetics, I am concerned about this intersection in

that you learn, and then would just ask

that we be thinking about those others

throughout the city that kind of have the same,

like wow, that's an earlier session.

The other example, or the other question that I had

was focusing on the most common complaints.

I think we've got 150 complaints per year,

now please address this issue.

And did you say the most common

to put the lights out.

The most common one is a malfunction.

Is the light not working or is the dayburn?

But in the grand scheme of life,

150 lights out of 5,300 is really not that many.

So we don't have that many problems in a typical year.

They're pretty reliable.

Well, requests for services from the community.

Knockdowns come in from the PD.

So we get at least 12 to 15 of those a year.

Other things we notice when we're out doing our maintenance.

So when we're maintaining the lights, checking them, we notice that there's something faulty.

So we catch it before someone's caught.

Seems kind of like a weird question, but do we have someone working at night?

That's just out the street like that.

No.

Because that's why we're not working.

Okay.

The cost to operate, I'll say just pleasingly low, I get the cost of approximately, if I'm

doing my math right, maybe $110 per light per year for the street lights as opposed

to the traffic lights.

So if we were to, in theory,

setting aside the cost of putting the light

and the actual operating cost is not that big.

You're talking about the electricity used

and also any maintenance involved with it.

Everything that's on that list,

you know, my math was 40% of 1.5 million is 600,000.

We don't quite have 6,000 lights,

but, you know, close to there,

just divide one by the other,

you get to about $100 per life,

at 10% more, so $110 per life.

It's kind of how I'm thinking about this.

Obviously, no individual life gets $110 per year of service,

but just, I think, system-wide,

that feels pretty good to me.

If we were, as a committee, to be interested in Nigeria,

where are places that we could come up with cost savings,

either through making bigger investment

in quality of materials or better protection

for the wiring, the junction boxes,

or whatever it might be.

What are some of the things that,

or you're making trade-offs about how to spend money

and, geez, I wish we could do this.

So the trade-off, when you're talking about

the vandalism or crime,

it's very expensive for that to be a trade-off.

because to buy a locking lid cover for one of our pull boxes is $500 to $800 per.

And each one of those lights in San Diego has one of those.

So you're talking 5,000 plus lights at $500 to $800 to secure the wire.

The locking hand pull covers, a regular hand pull cover,

the one we use to access the wires in the pull itself is about this big,

those are $110 a piece.

A locking one is $200 a piece.

So to secure the light pole and the lid on the toolbox, you're looking at about $1,000

for each one.

So times that by the $5,000, you can get that number.

I remember.

Yeah.

What's interesting about it is that, or whatever, what I think I'm going to hear you say is

that we don't have enough vandalism, enough copper theft to justify that type of investment.

Well, something that we've actually done to try to avoid that is we try to get the locking end hole covers as much as we can.

The supply of those is down a lot because every city is going to do the same thing.

Something that the city of Oakland does, which we don't want to do, is when one of their pool boxes gets vandalized,

they replace the wires in it and they fill it with concrete.

We have been doing the outside.

We have been trying to make a full line of pool boxes and we'll lock the ends,

and then the ones in the middle that don't have the locking covers, we fill them with gravel.

So it increased the labor costs if we do have to go back in there and do maintenance

because now we have to dig out a bunch of gravel.

So you went from maybe a 10-minute repair to now an hour and a half repair.

I think the only other question that I would have is to try to understand,

And, well, did I let you finish on things?

Places where we like to spend money if we had money.

And then how can we cut costs?

Those are always that way.

Divisioning, how can we deliver more?

Because if we had this technology, we could do something better with our streetlights.

And the switch LED was a big deal.

Cost savings and all that kind of stuff.

But if there's something else out there, this would be the time to let us know.

Geez, it'd be nice if we could do this.

then apartments separate from that.

We still have to save money.

It wouldn't save money, but if we had more money to spend,

obviously we'd be adding more lights and adding more staff

to be able to maintain the lights.

That's not going to be a cost savings, though.

There's going to be more costs associated with it

because of the electricity involved, the maintenance involved,

the installations.

But if we have more money, it would be nice to get more lights.

Do we have a part of the city or a set of streets prioritized

where we can maybe disproportionate a number of complaints,

wow, it's really dark here,

or can we move from X wattage to Y wattage?

The residential areas, we get most of our complaints

about the lights being dim or being too dark.

The problem with that right now would be

if we add a brighter light to the existing light pole,

then we get complaints from the neighbor across the street

that the light's coming in their window.

So we have to be mindful of both things.

We want it to be bright enough for people to feel safe,

but we're not trying to violate people by having lights shining through windows.

Completely random question, heading a completely different direction.

One of the things that I have wondered about for these particularly dark streets

that have a lot of trees, just thinking outside the box,

What if we help support the installation of light,

you know, just low light poles,

six foot, seven foot poles that go in somebody's yard.

They control, but they're actually right there

at the sidewalk, underneath the trees.

And if you distribute that,

cause a bunch of crops, a whole bunch of neighbors,

that kind of obviates some of the need

in the maintenance as long as they were struggling once.

I have no idea what that cost would be

because you don't install those currently.

I thought I'd offer that really just as a common class

spoken with some people in the community about that concept.

People could, for lack of better work,

take personal responsibility for lighting up their front yards

and so the concerns that we hear about other student artists,

student artists, well, I'm going to find my light.

Yeah, as a J.C.Y. city engineer, one of the things we do encourage the private residents

to do when they do submit a concern about a dark neighborhood and we explain to them

the street lights are to light the road, not necessarily the right sidewalk.

We do encourage them to install their own lights on their house, motion detectors or

something that will help light their front yards and help them that way.

That is one thing that the residents can do.

And I agree on, I think that just being cognizant of,

just like we've talked about, the ring cameras

to help support public safety through PD,

and there's other types of grants that we do periodically

where we can work with, I don't know,

the grant holders that might support

this kind of alcohol and creative thinking,

where we're working in collaboration with individuals

to help them achieve some of their objectives

and also thereby relieving the burden of the city.

So it's a typical new one.

So I'm gonna close this item off.

Thank you very much for the presentation.

I actually wanna say that it was really illuminating,

but I will really try to stop.

Committee member comments?

So I don't hear.

To this point in time, we will adjourn.

Our time is 4.34.

4.33.