I had noticed on my street, that the NEMA head bucket rental fixtures that aren't used, have their photocells removed. This makes sense more than removing the lamp, because it keeps the ballast from running. But also it allows rain water to leak into the photocell socket and into the fixture. So the fixtures may be corroded inside. Just wondering if you have seen this before.

I'm not sure if they do this on LED fixtures, because they may be able to control them via an app, if they did have that option enabled.

Here, if they pay a visit to the fixture and the customer wants it off, they remove it altogether, including the thru bolt. There is a customer that has one installed and removed every couple of years and they never leave it up, they always remove it completely when she no longer wants it.

I've seen some places used what's called a open cap in place of the PC to disable a streetlight. Open caps are basically a cap that installs over the PC socket and disables the light. They're nice since you don't have to worry about rain getting in the open PC socket like you said.

That's correct.  They put caps on em. 

I’ve never seen a shorting cap in real life but I believe some of them are much smaller than regular photocells so they might give the appearance of an empty pc socket while not necessarily the case.

I didn't know there were open caps, I thought there were only shorting caps that make the light stay on all the time. I guess it is possible that these lights have open caps on them, because the photocell socket does look a bit tall. The only way to see would be with a drone.

I hadn't noticed many rental lights getting removed. Usually they leave them up. The only one I know of that was removed was the one nearby my house, which I guess was in the way when they were installing an underground feed on the pole. They did, however, leave the other fixture, which is on its own pole, and its wire is still connected to the transformer.

Why they just don't remove the fuse to the fixture?? It's the most safest way to turn off any streetlight.

Why they just don't remove the fuse to the fixture?? It's the most safest way to turn off any streetlight.

Here, the only street lights with a separate fuse are ones with their own transformer feed. The others are connected directly to the lines, so there's no way to disconnect them only.

OK so it means that if a ballast or PC gets short you'll have a firework in the fixture? 

here every single street light pole has its own fuse, mostly 6 Amps. In the transformer station every street lighting branch is fused by 16, 20 or max. 25 Amps. fuses on all three phases.