Lighting Up Twin Peaks: Improved Pedestrian Lighting for a Safer City Experience

Lighting Up Twin Peaks: Improved Pedestrian Lighting for a Safer City Experience

Alas, I have officially developed a conceptual level effort for improving lighting standards at Twin Peaks! It is available for your viewing in e-reader viewing at the link above.

This concludes my research proposal for improved pedestrian lighting along the Christmas Tree Point Road, a short 0.2 mile loop in San Francisco atop Twin Peaks. This area, which presently provides no installed pedestrian lighting, requires our attention for several reasons. Chief among these reasons include zero adherence to the San Francisco Better Streets Plan and the responsibility of urban planners to provide relief from the perceived physical danger in this immediate area.

In the brief 8-weeks of my senior thesis studies, I have come to understand that the relationship between urbanization and increased risks in anxiety and mood disorders are extremely real and easily reconcilable through smarter pedestrian lighting design.

Currently, the San Francisco Better Streets Plan, adopted in 2010, leaves a lot of gray area for what are the "best" luminaires to uses in pedestrian zones. Through careful reading of this large document, available for public reading here, I have identified some dark-sky friendly lighting solutions which:

• focus light toward the pedestrian pathway only
• provide a rhythm of lighting consistent with the nearby neighborhood/area
• are appropriate to the overall streetscape style and identity of the neighborhood/area
• mitigate sky glow
• provide a clear distinction of faces from a minimum 13' distance

In order to be informative and honest, I have included design weaknesses for this proposal. These weakness, outlined in Chapter 4, include a lack of qualification for installed pedestrian lighting in this area as it could be considered a small priority because it is not exactly a "high-pedestrian volume street," as well as current funding handled by SF Public Works for the reconfiguration of a nearby pedestrian promenade along the eastern Twin Peaks Blvd. 

Moving forward, my focus in developing this pedestrian lighting solution will aim at leveraging the nearby promenade resources to include safer pedestrian lighting with consistent pedestrian lighting fixtures at the Christmas Tree Point Road, as the area remains open until midnight year-round.