The City of San Diego is holding a community meeting next week in Rancho Bernardo to inform residents of its Smart Streetlight program.

The meeting will be held from 6 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 10 in the Rancho Bernardo Library, 17110 Bernardo Center Drive. It will be an opportunity for residents to learn more about the technology that is being installed on approximately 4,200 streetlights citywide, including some in Rancho Bernardo.

Per a city map at tinyurl.com/SmartLightsMap, at least a dozen City IQ Nodes have been installed along Rancho Bernardo streets, including Rancho Bernardo Road, Bernardo Center Drive, Bernardo Heights Parkway, Paseo Lucido and West Bernardo Drive.

In adjacent communities they have been installed along Carmel Mountain Road, Ted Williams Parkway, Black Mountain Road, Poway Road (the portion in Sabre Springs), Camino del Sur, Carmel Valley Road and Scripps Poway Parkway.

According to the city’s website, “The Smart Streetlights project began as a cost-savings effort for the city to replace high energy use streetlights with more efficient LED lights. It evolved into deployment of the world’s largest smart city sensor platform. The platform provides a connected digital infrastructure, which will lead to new opportunities for the city to better serve residents and businesses through data-driven processes, tools and capabilities.”

The streetlights can be programmed to be dimmed at certain times of the day when full light levels are not required, such as dawn and dusk. This is projected to save about $2.8 million in annual energy costs, according to city officials.

The lights also feature City IQ sensor nodes that generate data on things such as pedestrian and vehicle movement, parking activity, the temperature and humidity. Those nodes have been concentrated downtown and their full installation is to be completed by next summer, officials said.

Potential future applications are supposed to improve parking by making it easier for drivers to find parking spots, improve traffic flow through en route guidance, inform city officials where bicycle lanes are needed to enhance mobility citywide and improve public safety due to the sensors’ presence being a crime deterrent.

“Video data from digital smart city infrastructure will make it easier to identify, and therefore, arrest criminals,” city officials wrote on the website. “Similar technology has been applied in many other cities across the nation, with the median reduction in gunshots recorded as 20 percent across cities that saw reductions.”

According to city officials, the captured data is stored in a secure cloud database and is accessible to the public through a “key” on the city’s website.

Images and videos are stored locally on the sensor for five days before being overwritten. “In certain cases, authorized San Diego Police Department staff can request access to sensor video data for a specified location within the five-day period,” according to the city’s website. “This data is transferred to their own software platform with additional security and chain of custody protocols. Such requests can only be made in relation to investigations of serious crimes.”

Data is retained for seven years.

“While this project is a tremendous technological benefit to the city and our citizens, we recognize and value the importance of privacy,” city officials wrote. “Raw video and image data are not accessible to general city staff or any members of the public. Additionally, the system is not equipped with license plate reader technology, facial recognition or pan-tilt-zoom capabilities. Private property information is not visible to any users.”

For more information, go to tinyurl.com/SDSmartStreetlights.

