Photo by hellomarkers!

This week, Mayor Muriel Bowser is putting the spotlight on D.C. streetlamps by introducing a new initiative to fix broken bulbs.

“We have 70,000 street lights in the District and too many of them do not work,” she said.

Bowser is seeking the community’s help in identifying faulty lamps. Now, folks can text “streetlight” to DC311 to report an outage, in addition to contacting 311 on its website, by phone, or over social media. The D.C. Department of Transportation is tracking the requests on a website, which, as of now, indicates more than 160 closed investigations into street lamps this week.

DDOT is currently in charge of maintenance, though D.C. had a years-long saga over a bid for contracting out the oversight of the lamps.

“By fixing street lights, we can make District streets safer, stronger, and brighter,” Bowser said, in a riff on the name of her public safety agenda.

The debate over whether street lights actually deter crime is ongoing. Recent studies indicate that darker streets don’t necessarily lead to increased crime or car crashes, but they do correlate with a perception of greater danger among residents.

“Would the crimes happen anyway? Quite possibly. You’re left with a darn ‘what if’ and you can never answer ‘what if’ questions,” says Terry Lynch, the executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations and D.C. citizen activist. “Would it have stopped the crimes? Who the heck knows. But it certainly doesn’t help.”

Lynch says that over the course of the year, he’s already reported about 1,000 street lamps to 311, though issues ranged from not being on at night, to being on during the day, to having graffiti tags on the base.

He says the initiative is “very welcome,” though he’d like to see an upgrade of the lighting system to a smart grid. “This is not an east-west problem—this is a citywide problem.”