New national street lights data shines a light on Britain’s brightest and darkest roads to support safe travel

Showing the position of street lights will help local councils and service providers to identify safe walking and cycling routes to important services such as hospitals, train stations and schools. It will also identify the need for new street lighting where safe routes are currently limited, enabling more effective use of local transport budgets and better support for statutory duties like school admissions. The data contributes to Active Travel policies by encouraging walking and cycling as a healthier and more sustainable option than driving. Transport bodies and local authorities can use the data to maintain street lights more effectively, and it may also identify opportunities to repurpose existing infrastructure, for example by installing EV charge points or 5G technology. 

OS analysis of street lights in the 50 largest towns or cities in Britain shows that the brightest lit is Sunderland, where there is a density of over 650 streetlights per square kilometre, compared to the lowest in Northampton, which has 305 lights per square kilometre. Surprisingly, London comes halfway down the list with 400. Sunderland also comes out top as the town or city with the most fully or mostly lit roads at 98%, with York at the lowest with 81%.

The level of illumination is based on an inferred light radius from streetlights and their intersection with the road. Roads that are fully lit have over 80% of their length intersecting with the light, and those that are mostly lit have over 50%. The largest continuous fully-lit region in the country is the West Midlands, showing a connected network of 3,713km of roads with streetlights.

OS has been exploring how street lights data could be used to support a variety of insights. One way could be to highlight crime hotspots, mixing it with OS NGD datasets to show how crime may correlate with darker environments, commercial or residential areas, greenspaces and so on. Working with Snowflake, OS has developed a demonstrator which took open crime data from Police UK in the West Midlands area and used a raft of datasets from the OS NGD – including street lights, land use and buildings – to develop insights into the types of areas where a higher proportion of particular crime types are being committed in the region. This could help develop more effective crime prevention strategies such as increased police patrols in high-risk areas.

The Street Light feature type is available in OS NGD Transport Features collection, and the information on light coverage for roads and paths is available in the OS NGD Transport Network Collection. The street light data was released as part of the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA). The PSGA is a contract between Government Digital Service, managed on behalf of the UK Government, and OS for the provision of geospatial data and services to the emergency services and wider public sector organisations. All of OS’s location data is available to market through a range of products and services accessed via the OS Data Hub – which provides access to the data through both APIs and downloads.