Illuminating Chicago
GIS for Streetlight Inventory & Mapping
- Client: City of Chicago Department of Transportation, Department of Electrical Operations
- Prime Consultant: T.Y. Lin International Group, Great Lakes
About this Project
The Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) is charged with maintaining the majority of street and traffic lights on the city’s electrical network.
With inaccuracies between the city’s lighting database and the electrical distributor, Commonwealth Edison (ComEd)’s, database, the development of this geospatial database was vital to the continued resolution of billing systems and information systems.
Urban GIS served as the technical lead in conducting a street light inventory for the city, providing the database development and GIS mapping needed to understand the sheer number of lighting fixtures as well as their locations, conditions, and attributions.
Additionally, we digitized, scaled, georeferenced and integrated lighting atlases into the database. After the data collection and the atlas integration, we developed a custom web application and user-friendly desktop tools.
This application and set of tools allow users to run customized digital mapping queries from the office or the field and allows for real-time feature updating and editing, which enables further light fixture surveying, testing, and condition assessments.
As a means of resolving the inaccuracies between the City’s Esri ArcMap and ComEd’s GE Smallworld databases, our team created a custom script that provided nightly reconciliation between the systems.
Our work provided CDOT with a comprehensive, easy-to-use database, laid the foundation for a more effective and efficient billing process, facilitated quicker outage response times, and allowed for more effective construction and maintenance schedules. This GIS will continue to add value as the City of Chicago builds out an LED smart lighting system.