In 2012, the City Council revised the City’s Lighting Policy to allow for the year-round lighting of the Ocean Avenue medians between Junipero and Monte Verde. In 2014, the City Council directed the Planning Commission to review different lighting options for the Ocean Avenue medians. A subcommittee was formed to evaluate potential lighting treatments and obtain input from the community. The subcommittee met several times and held public workshops in September and December of 2014. Ten lighting treatments were evaluated and the top three options chosen were, 1) existing lighting, 2) LED 3 color mini champagne lights and 3) no lighting.

Designer’s Choice Lighting Option

The Designer’s Choice lighting option (Treatment #3) that Ms. Nole selected is an uplight fixture that is intended to be long lasting, maintenance free, and energy efficient while illuminating the trees in an elegant and sophisticated manner. The focus of the uplighting would be on the more significant trees within the medians where the illumination will enhance the beauty and structure of the tree branches and canopy.

String Lighting Options

The other two lighting design options are both string lights. The first option (Treatment #1) consists of white string lights that the City has historically used in the medians year-round (“existing conditions”). The lights are wrapped on tree trunks and branches. The second option (Treatment #2) is 3-color champagne mini lights which were located west of Dolores Street. The champagne lights would only be installed on tree branches, not tree trunks, to illuminate the tree canopy from within. Both string light options would include energy efficient LED lights. One of the challenges with string lights is that installation is labor intensive and re-wrapping the lights would be necessary every few years as the trees grow and expand.

Community Outreach

All three lighting treatments (white string lights, champagne lights, and uplights) were on display in select locations along Ocean Avenue for two months to invite public comment on each treatment. The location of each lighting treatment is shown in Attachment 2.

Signs were placed in the medians and on the sidewalk on the north and south sides of Ocean Ave (Attachment 3) identifying the location of each lighting treatment and providing a website address and QR code for members of the community to access an on-line survey and vote for their favorite lighting treatment.

The on-line survey was available from November 1, 2018 to December 31, 2018 and a total of 192 votes were cast with 94% of the responses being in favor of some form of lighting treatment in the median (Attachment 4). The following is a breakdown of the survey results:

Staff is seeking a recommendation from the Planning Commission on which landscape lighting treatment should be installed within the Ocean Ave medians.

Path Lights

In addition to the landscape lighting treatment, path lights (Attachment 5) were installed in the median at Ocean and Dolores to evaluate crosswalk lighting for pedestrians. On the east side of Dolores, two path lights were placed at each corner of the median and on the west side, one path light was installed. The purpose for providing two options was to determine the appropriate level of lighting desired.

The benefit of one path fixture is fewer fixtures in the median while providing some illumination at the center of the crosswalk. However, one fixture centrally located in the median would partially obstruct the view of plaques located at select medians. Two path light fixtures, one at each corner of the median, would not interfere with the plaques and provide more illumination within the crosswalk. Staff recommends two path light fixtures for the medians and is seeking a recommendation from the Planning Commission on whether the crosswalks should contain one path light, two path lights or no path lights.

Next Steps