B.C. cities seeing the light over LED street illumination

From the air at night, Boundary Road reveals a stark divide between Vancouver and Burnaby.

Aerial photographs show that on the Vancouver side, the city’s irregular cross-hatch of streets are traced out in almost garish yellow-orange light. On the Burnaby side, however, the streets show as a circuit board of cool bluish white.

It’s a sign Burnaby is further ahead in the municipal transition to LED street lighting from the old-school, high pressure sodium fixtures that have dominated North American cities for almost 60 years, though Vancouver is catching-up.

Burnaby completed its program to convert 11,600 street lights to LED lighting in 2019 at a cost of $4.8 million, according to the Burnaby Now. Burnaby Mayor Mike Hurley expected to recover the expense quickly through an expected $750,000 a year in savings on electricity.

“Energy conservation like this makes sense on so many levels,” Hurley said at the time.