The City of Stonnington has embarked upon a multi-year project to upgrade the Kooyongkoot shared path along the Gardiners Creek.
The Kooyongkoot shared path upgrade along Gardiners Creek was initially a straightforward project: resurface and improve the existing shared path for the Stonnington community. What emerged was something far more ambitious.
How we got here
When designing the layout, it became clear that this section of the creek runs through a less urbanised area of our city. This means that detecting faults in standard lighting infrastructure would be hard to identify and challenging to fix. We also realised that the regular daylight white-light colour temperate of the lighting fixtures might risk affecting the nocturnal habitat.
Our innovative approach to lighting
To protect biodiversity and support public safety, we implemented a smart lighting system with remote monitoring technology that allows for real time alerts. Each light fitting along the Kooyongkoot path has been designed to fit a sensor that can be utilised in the future to monitor parameters such as air quality, traffic and noise.
Improved lighting will directly address the issue of personal safety after dark - a known barrier to path use for women, older residents and mobility aid users.
The lighting system also adjusts the intensity of the lights and the colour temperature after hours to protect our nocturnal wildlife.
Motion sensors are fitted on dedicated poles which will turn the lights on in pairs, as it detects motion by pedestrians or cyclists.
The lighting system dims the light output at night to help preserve the biodiversity and reduce adverse emissions. During nighttime however, movement will be detected by the motion sensors and the light poles ahead will turn on, following the user's travel direction.
The results
Whilst the lighting was only installed in May 2026, we are already seeing some positive results.
We have been able to identify lights experiencing faults through the remote monitoring system, meaning Council could easily locate and fix these lights with minimal site visits.
As more benefits are realised, we'll update this page to keep our community informed.
IoT observation station
As the design progressed, more interest in this project was shown by other Council departments, such as Transport and Environment, with a focus on the data in this geographical area.
It became clear to the project team that there was a need to build a powered asset that will provide a place for future technologies.
This station is currently used to collect real-time traffic data, and we plan for this location to deploy water and air quality sensors, in addition to flood monitoring.
You can learn more about the Observation Station project on the Municipal Association of Victoria website.
Take a look at our approach to lighting
The sensors plugged into light poles along Kooyongkoot
Our lights guiding path users at nighttime using an orange light to prevent disturbing our nocturnal wildlife
The IoT Observation station