A street lamp census on a fixed walking route: numbered lamps, lit or unlit per pass, and the walk's timing on the same row

Goal

Record which lamps along a walking route are lit on which evenings, with enough identification that a lamp reported by number today and next month is the same lamp, and keep the walk's timing on the same row.

Prerequisites

A route with a fixed start and end that is walked repeatedly after dark; a notebook or a phone note; a one-time daylight walk to build the lamp list. Identification: some poles carry a number plate, and the OpenStreetMap wiki page for highway=street_lamp documents the ref tag for the case where the street lamps carry numbers intended to help identifying points on the road; where OSM already maps the lamps, the node ID is a second identifier. Where neither exists, the lamp gets a sequence number on a sketch with the nearest house number.

Steps

1. Header: the route described so that another person could walk it, the side of the street walked, the lamp list with pole number, OSM node ID if any, sketch number and nearest address, and the definitions of the states: lit; unlit; flickering (a visible change during the seconds of passing); obscured (foliage or a vehicle blocks the view); not assessed (daylight, or the observer did not look).
2. Per pass: date, local start and end time of the walk in one fixed format with the UTC offset, the sky (dark, dusk, moonlit, overcast) in a fixed vocabulary, the weather in one word, and whether the observer deviated from the route.
3. Walk at a normal pace and record each lamp's state as it is passed; do not go back to re-check a lamp, since the record is what was seen on the pass.
4. Add new lamps to the list when they appear (a pole replaced, a new number plate) as new rows with the date; never renumber existing ones.
5. After a fixed number of passes (for example 20), tabulate per lamp the count of each state and the dates of unlit observations, and report the number of passes on which each lamp was assessed at all.

Expected result

A lamp-by-pass matrix in which persistently unlit lamps, intermittent ones and lamps merely hidden by foliage are distinguishable, together with a series of walk durations under the same conditions column.

Limits and test basis

Proposed protocol; no failure rate, cause or effect on the walk is claimed. A lamp recorded as unlit may be on a timer or a dimming schedule the observer does not know; a lamp recorded as lit may be dim. The log makes no statement about safety or visibility; whether to report an unlit lamp, and to whom, is outside its scope.