The death of 7-year-old Kamari Hughes one year ago this Saturday at the hands of a turning NYPD tow truck driver sparked outrage and spurred new organizing to improve safety at dangerous intersections like the one in Fort Greene where he died.
In response, Mayor Adams committed to remove parking from the corners of 1,000 intersections per year, a process known as “daylighting.” His administration may fall short of that commitment, Streetsblog reported today — though city officials claim they are "working towards" getting there by the end of the year.
Daylighting removes parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk to increase visibility for pedestrians, drivers and cyclists as they pass through intersections. New York state law requires daylighting, setting a clear standard for what constitutes a daylighted intersection — prohibiting parking within twenty feet of the crosswalk. The law leaves little to interpretation: The four corners of an intersection must have all eight pieces of the curb clear of parked vehicles.
However, New York City is exempted from the state daylighting requirement. That puts five borough pedestrians at risk while the rest of the State enjoys a much higher standard for intersection safety. It is well past time for this to change. New York City should no longer be an exception when it comes to intersection safety. The standards that protect lives across New York must be applied within the five boroughs, and the city and state must work in tandem by codifying safety improvements in law and bolstering city-level implementation to fix the problem.
A year after Hughes’s death, with children back in school and the anniversary of the mayor’s pledge approaching, it’s time to take another look at where New York City stands with daylighting and why all New Yorkers should support the common sense safety intervention.
Daylighting allows curb space to be repurposed for uses other than parking, which unlocks many benefits for local communities on top of the added safety. For example, planting greenery in daylighted curb space mitigates flooding by retaining stormwater. Additionally, greenery reduces the urban heat island effect which lowers energy costs in summer months. This also makes street corners, and whole neighborhoods, look nicer when applied at scale.
Another simple treatment, public seating in reclaimed curb space, helps strengthen social networks in neighborhoods by creating more places for residents to interact organically. This yields remarkable benefits — decreasing loneliness, creating social outlets for seniors who often serve as a stabilizing force in communities, providing informal local support networks that can help those facing financial difficulties or displacement, and facilitating a sense of belonging and community that helps reduce crime.
All in all, daylighting is much more than a safety treatment. It represents the potential of a New York City that can look beyond using every inch of the curb for private vehicles.
But daylighting must be implemented at the city level, New Yorkers need not rely solely on the mayor to bring daylighting to our streets.
Near the end of the last state legislative session, representatives in Albany introduced bills to end New York City’s exemption from state daylighting laws and force the city to meet state standards. A growing number of community boards support daylighting as well, with 20 boards having passed resolutions calling for universal daylighting as of October 21. This vocal support at the neighborhood level provides sufficient grounds for state representatives to feel confident about backing the policy. It should be a top priority for them when they reconvene in January.
Changes to state law will complement city daylighting efforts by setting a clear legal standard and enabling the city to enforce this by ticketing cars parked within twenty feet of crosswalks. It will remove any local barriers to implementation — such as monied interests pressuring the city to stall safety improvements, a serious problem in recent years — and prevent the Adams administration from cutting corners on implementation.
When the Adams administration announced its plan to daylight 1,000 intersections per year, they skirted the definition — merely promising “lifesaving visibility improvements through a tool known as daylighting to at least 1,000 … intersections each year.” But an intersection with added visibility on only one corner is not daylighted. In such cases, pedestrians still face the hazard of reduced visibility if vehicles are parked or standing next to the curb where they cross. Perhaps predictably, given the Adams administration’s notoriety for watering down street safety projects, the administration on Sept. 3 published a misleading list of 300 intersections where they “improved visibility for pedestrians … through a tool known as ‘daylighting,’” and claimed to be on track to daylight 1,000 intersections in 2024.
In fact, these 300 intersections are not universally daylighted. Without assessing this list thoroughly, several of the listed intersections close to my home stick out for failing to meet state daylighting standards. For example, Underhill Avenue and Dean Street in Prospect Heights has only one street corner with improved visibility. The intersections of Underhill Avenue and Prospect Place and Underhill Avenue and St. Johns Place, despite some new increased visibility, have several corners that remain blocked by parked vehicles. Even worse, DOT installed the new safety treatments at these intersections in 2023, not 2024, raising the question of why DOT included them towards its 2024 pledge.
Another example close to home, Bedford Avenue and Lincoln Place, has only a few feet of added visibility on a single corner, while the rest of the intersection has no safety treatments of any kind. The added visibility at this intersection also existed prior to 2024. DOT added flimsy plastic flex posts this year, which is seemingly why the location made the list.
The Adams administration clearly fudged the numbers for its September announcement, and it remains unclear what level of progress has actually been achieved since Hughes’s death. While the administration toots its horn, New Yorkers continue to face unnecessary hazards when crossing the street and are denied the many other benefits daylighting provides. Obviously any increased visibility at intersections improves safety, but misrepresenting the city's progress erodes trust, betrays the families of victims of traffic violence and signals that the city is more concerned with metrics to tout in press releases than the actual safety of people who live here. Held to no legal standards, Mayor Adams’s daylighting initiative will fail to provide meaningful safety improvements.
Simply put, the city’s modest progress towards improving visibility is not sufficient to keep New Yorkers safe. New York City has tens of thousands of intersections. Even the mayor’s 1,000 intersection-per-year commitment would take decades to implement citywide. The state must intervene and remove New York City’s dangerous daylighting exemption.
