SmartBlockPHL Sensor Streetlight Pilot

Philadelphia wired 14 streetlights on one block with pedestrian-counting sensors in 2021 — the city's own program page still describes the pilot in the present tense in 2026, but nothing suggests it ever left that one block.

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SmartBlockPHL put 14 sensor-equipped streetlights on a single block of South 13th Street in Center City, installed December 2021, as a partnership between the City's Office of Innovation and Technology, the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability, and private partners Comcast, Juganu and US Ignite. Optical sensors count pedestrians, vehicles and cyclists using local edge computing, storing no video and transmitting only anonymized counts, to test whether such sensors could replace manual traffic counts. Reporting describes the pilot as running through late 2022, and no results report or expansion beyond that single block has surfaced since; as of 2026 the city's own program page still describes it in the present tense, with no clear indication of whether the sensors are still active.