City of Newton, MA
Home MenuUtility Poles
Download Data:
This data layer shows all utility poles in Newton. It has been used primarily for street light maintenance. This can lead to some confusion because not all poles have street lights attached to them. Poles that don’t have lights (usually telephone poles) have no values for the street light attributes such as [LAMPTYPE] and [LUMENSIZE]. To show only street lights use a selection based on lamp type not being “0”. The primary identifier for street lights and poles is the [RID] field. This corresponds to the numbers that appear on the poles. It is a concatenation of a pole number and one or two post numbers with slashes separating these components (eg. 123/5 or 112/4/5). Not all RID values are unique. This has caused some problems but we have set up workarounds in our processes to alert users to the multiple occurrences of pole numbers. Some other structures show up in this database for unknown reasons so there are RID values such as “TREE” and “POLICE BOX”
Some street lights along major streets are mounted on concrete poles. These poles did not have numbers originally because they were difficult to put numbers on. The original database listed them as “0/0” for the RID. The City of Newton created a numbering scheme for them based on a combination of the first 4 letters of the street name and the nearest address. For example the pole close to 1172 Walnut Street has an ID of “WALN/1172”. These numbers were affixed to a plastic band that was mounted to each pole.
NOTE: Street lights have been moved to a separate layer. This layer will be available here in the future.
Features and Attributes
The layer consists of points at the base location of each pole. Attributes came from the electric company. Some of the fields that are not used by the city were removed. Other attributes were added by the GIS Administrator in support of maintenance such as the Hansen database fields, DPW Administrative areas such as snow plowing routes, parcel IDs and address information. Addresses were automatically calculated to the closest record found, not always on the correct street.
| Name | Alias | Description | Data Type | Width |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| POINT_TAG | Point ID | Unique identifier from NSTAR database | Text | 16 |
| POINT_SUBT | Utility Pole Type | Type of pole | Text | 12 |
| ***coded values*** | ||||
| GS | Guy Stub | |||
| HS | H Structure | |||
| P | Wood Pole | |||
| RP | Riser Pole | |||
| SL | Light Pole – no other use for pole | |||
| RID | Pole ID | Pole Identifier-there are some duplicates | Text | 18 |
| POLENUM | Pole Number | Pole number-first part of RID | Long Integer | 10 |
| POST1 | Post 1 | Post number-second part of RID | Short Integer | 5 |
| POST2 | Post 2 | Secondary post number if needed-third part of RID | Text | 6 |
| LUMENSIZE | Luminosity | Brightness value of street light in lumens | Long Integer | 10 |
| LAMPTYPE | Lamp Type | Code for street lamp type, 0 = no street light | Short Integer | 5 |
| POLETYPE | POLETYPE | Type (purpose) of pole | Short Integer | 5 |
| BILLDATE | Original Billing Date | Date of original billing | Date | |
| INSTALLDT | Installation Date | Date installed | Date | |
| SBL_ID | Parcel ID | ID of nearby parcel | Text | 12 |
| NUM | Number | Number for nearby address | Double | 11 |
| STREET | Street | Street for nearby address | Text | 20 |
| VILLAGE | Village | Village | Text | 20 |
| ZIPCODE | Zip Code | Zip Code | Text | 6 |
| SR_NAME | Snow Route | Snow Route | Text | 4 |
| YARD | DPW Garage Area | DPW garage responsible for maintenance | Text | 10 |
| COMPTYPE | COMPTYPE | Hansen Database Component Type | Short Integer | 5 |
| UNITID | UNITID | Hansen Database ID-same as RID | Text | 12 |
| MAP | MAP | Assessors Map | Text | 4 |
| COMPKEY | COMPKEY | Hansen Database Internal ID | Long Integer | 10 |
| ADDRKEY | ADDRKEY | Hansen Database Address ID | Double | 10 |
| CENSTRACT | Census Tract | Census Tract | Text | 6 |
Last Updated: April, 2020