An energy efficient street lighting system is proposed in this paper to obtain a balance between energy savings and utility in terms of illumination by the street lights. The finite coverage of every street light equipped with the sensor is divided into zones according to the distance of the nearest pedestrian or vehicle with respect to that street light. The illumination of the street light is adjusted accordingly with respect to zones. Every street is divided into sections depending on the average distance between street lights. The parameters namely the energy savings as well as the utility of the lights in a section are defined in terms of the values of length of a zone and the factor of brightness decrement per zone. The best value of this decrement factor is determined by tuning to obtain energy efficiency. Simulation results highlight that the proposed work outperforms the existing method. As an outcome, the proposed scheme obtains a superior % of energy savings over existing work without falling below minimum utility for a small inter-distance.