City of Atlanta Crews Ramp Up Street Light Repairs in Midtown
Published: 08/05/21
BY ELLIE HENSLEY
Street lights are an important element to public safety in any urban environment. And in recent months, the City of Atlanta has been working with Midtown Alliance to ramp up efforts to fix outages througout the district.
City of Atlanta Department of Transportation (ATLDOT) crews have replaced about 100 street lights in the district as a result of a work order issued by ATLDOT Commissioner Josh Rowan. Work continues to fix remaining outages in Midtown.
Midtown Alliance’s landscaping and maintenance operation, Midtown Green, is on the job in the district’s right-of-way daily and keeps a log of street light outages. It prioritizes this outage list based on the number of lights out and heavy traffic areas and shares this list with the City so it can make repairs. Midtown Green communicates daily with ATLDOT to get updates on progress.
“We value our partnership with the City helping to remediate issues in the right of way, especially as they pertain to public safety,” said Kyle Guess, Program Manager at Midtown Green. “ATLDOT has a huge undertaking repairing street lights throughout the entire city. Midtown Green is on the streets everyday identifying and reporting issues specifically in the Midtown Improvement District. We act as a force multiplier for the City, as we will almost always be the first to see issues as they arise in Midtown.”
Green Team Assistant Manager Rusty Bishop logs a downed street light to report to the City of Atlanta.
Keeping the lights on takes a lot of vigilance and teamwork, especially in a district with so many site-specific construction projects under development that require temporary outages on corridors. The City, Midtown Alliance, Georgia Power and private developers must coordinate regularly to identify street light issues on an individual basis and repair them as quickly as possible.
Your Role in a Safer Midtown
If you are out in the district and see any street light outages, please report them to ATL 311. Be please prepared to report if it is an outage or physical damage, the closest cross streets and the closest associated address.