Plotting San Diego Streetlights

Illustration by Amy Krone using data supplied by Civic Knowledge

 The Challenge

After writing a series of stories about San Diego city infrastructure, Voice of San Diego reporter Liam Dillon turned his attention to street lamps. Although the city published GIS data for the locations of street lamps, Liam wanted to understand how the number of lamps varied by community.

The Solution

Working through our non profit project, the San Diego Regional Data Library, we computed small-area areal densities of street lamps and aggregated the densities by San Diego community, allowing Liam to tell a compelling story about where San Diegans are in the dark