Street-lighting is obviously linked to safety. Under the cover of darkness, crime does spread its sinister tentacles. But poorly lit footpaths are also about physical safety. A Street Quality Score (SQS 2015) prepared by ichangemycity shows that 51 per cent of Bengaluru streets have lighting levels way below the safety mark.

So, how exactly do you measure a safely-lit street? In their action plan for women’s safety on streets, the Delhi Development Authority and United Traffic and Transportation Infrastructure (Planning & Engineering) Centre (UTTIPEC) had defined it as one with an average Lux score greater than 10.

Lux is a measure of the intensity as perceived by the human eye, of light that hits or passes through a surface. A calibrated app was used to capture geo-tagged Lux values, at one second intervals, across the length of the street.

Surveying 3,075 kms of streets in Bengaluru through Jana Urban Services for Transformation (JUST), ichangemycity found that the average street-lighting was only 8 Lux. Thirty-seven per cent of the City (1,151 km/3,075 km of road) was not safely lit.

In the inner wards, 31 per cent of the road length (448/1,431 km) was not properly lit to safety standards. Forty-three per cent (703/1,644 km) of road length in the outer wards were also not adequately lit, the survey found.

Based on these findings, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) was given a set of recommendations: Survey the unlit stretch of 1,151 km; instal new streetlights where there are none and take up maintenance of those with insufficient lux. In effect, BBMP had to implement a phased plan for ensuring minimum 10 lux on the remaining 1,880 km of road in the City.

Besides Streetlighting in Bengaluru, the Street Quality Score 2015 is also a measure of the quality of Footpaths, Pedestrian Crossing, Bus-Stops and Air Pollution at the street-level. The data was secured through simple Android Apps, covering a total of 3,500 km of roads. The survey was conducted by JUST over a period of three months, from September to November 2015.