With the days getting shorter, many of us will soon be doing more walking in the dark. While there are many places in the city that need better lighting, there is now one fewer.
20th Ave NE over Ravenna Park has been closed to cars for decades, and while the old street light poles were still in place, they hadn’t been in use until recently. Just last week, those old light poles were retrofitted with modern LEDs to keep this pedestrian right-of-way lit after dark. Now people passing through here after sunset can feel a little safer.
Photo sent in by reader Nick Collecchi
Were these lights not “in use” (like, shut off by Seattle City Light), or did they simply burn out and no one ever reported them? I’ve reported hundreds of malfunctioning streetlights, and it always astounds me how few come back as previously reported. When reported, lights are usually fixed within a couple of weeks. But if no one tells SCL, they have no way of knowing which lights need to be fixed.
If a light isn’t on at all, or is cycling on and off—which is not normal behavior; streetlights should simply turn on and stay on—report it to SCL. You can use this page to report broken lights, or you can email street.light@seattle.gov. Note the three- or four-digit pole number and the nearest address, along with the type of malfunction.
SCL has a tracker where you can see how many street lights are waiting to be repaired, but you can be sure that only a small percentage of the lights that are malfunctioning have been reported. Thankfully, as SCL replaces more of the old fixtures with these LED lights, outages and malfunctions should be rare occurrences, not to mention how much crisper and brighter the LEDs are. But they’ll still go out sometime, and when they do, the City won’t know unless someone tells them!
I live in Ravenna, and it’s really cool, they’ve been replacing lots and lots of streetlights in my neighborhood with LED ones. I never really liked the old orange-ish streetlights that are all around.