St. Louis Missouri – October 2019 - Downtown St. Louis is a place with lots of attractions. And soon there will be another site to see. You will simply have to look up.

St. Louis is deploying a network of beautiful new smart streetlights to create a welcoming and safe experience for residents, workers and visitors as part of Project #LightMySTL.

“We came together as a community and said this is what we want to solve for,” said Missy Kelley the President of Downtown STL Inc. “We created a design competition and a request for information.”

The competition resulted in a groundbreaking solution created by a local company.

“Downtown St. Louis has high pressure sodium streetlights that are not really good for security,” said Ted Stegeman, the CEO of Labyrinth Technologies. “It creates a yellow tone. So it's not good when you're using cameras for surveillance.”

Project #LightMySTL was created by local business leaders to help the city improve the infrastructure in downtown St. Louis while making it safer. While safety was the goal, the lights also feature a decorative element that creates a stronger sense of place. More importantly, the lighting network is a sophisticated smart city network.

“It is smart city technology,” Kelley said. “There is basically a computer at every pole that gives us the ability to add other smart city technology that can make downtown even safer.”

“It is really is going to add a great deal of surveillance as well as lighting,” Police Chief John Hayden said.

 The street lights are adjustable so they could be powered up to daylight levels on command. They are powerful enough to light the streets as well as the sidewalks.

“Naturally, when people want to do nefarious things, it often in darkness,” Chief Hayden said. “And so when better lighting means more visibility, cameras can see more and people feel more comfortable.”

This new technology can communicate in real time with public works for maintenance. The system features programmable light strips housing hundreds of customizable LEDs allowing the city to brand itself and celebrate key events.

“We can do red, white, and green on the same strip for Christmas,” Stegeman said. “We can do snowfall patterns, fireworks. We can be like barber stripes, candy canes, rainbows. You name it.”

“Whether it is red for the Cardinals going to the world series or the blues is playing in the Stanley cup, finals and winning,” Kelley said. “Whatever it is, we can kind of customize the color of that to support what's happening downtown.”

It is smart city network and a homegrown solution.