The Adams administration contradicted a widely held belief that banning parking at corners — aka daylighting — provides better visibility and safety, releasing a report that advocates derided as deeply flawed.
The Department of Transportation's conclusion rests on shaky stats and suspect methodology, advocates charged, and its long-delayed release came just as a Council bill to require universal daylighting has gained momentum, following a nearly two-year grassroots push by the livable streets movement.
State law already bans parking within 20 feet of intersections, but the city has long exempted itself to provide more space for private car storage, even as 55 percent of pedestrian deaths and 79 percent of pedestrian traffic injuries happen at intersections, according to the agency.
Nonetheless, the DOT report recommended against universally implementing the parking ban, citing higher injury rates at corners where parking is not allowed versus junctions that do not prohibit car storage. The agency did find safety gains at intersections where it installed hard infrastructure, like bike racks, rocks, and planters — an expensive fix.
DOT officials said the report examined thousands of the city's intersections — but, crucially, the report is clear that the agency does not have proof of daylighting causing more crash injuries, just that officials believe drivers "cut" corners without barriers, which is why the agency does not support universal no-parking citywide.
"It doesn’t mean that the daylighting caused the injury. We’re not saying we can completely tie the causation; we didn’t go through years and years of records at 10,000 intersections," DOT's Deputy Commissioner for Transportation Planning and Management Eric Beaton told Streetsblog in an interview on Friday evening. "But it means that there is an association, a statistically significant association, that locations with that type of treatment had higher injuries.
"It told us that there’s something going on there. So it tells us that there’s a reason to be cautious," Beaton added.
But the study itself admits several flaws, specifically that the agency can't be sure where in an intersection a crash even occurred — at the daylighted corner or elsewhere. Nor does the city know if a car was illegally parked in daylighting space at the time of the crash:
"The truth is there’s nothing in this report that is statistically significant that plain old universal daylighting with no barrier does not work," said Alex Morano, a Brooklyn-based advocate and long supporter daylighting. "There’s nothing in there that shows it’s a net negative and DOT knows they can’t say that because plain and simple they don’t have the data."
What's in the report?
The study's [PDF] most significant finding was a 30-percent higher injury rate at crossings that bans parking via a hydrant or a bus stop, compared to similar junction where drivers can leave their cars right up against the crosswalk, based on more than 7,500 of the city's roughly 41,000 intersections.
The investigation also looked at 756 intersections that got a No Standing sign or hard infrastructure between 2019 and 2021, and compared their changes in annual injury rates against similar nearby crossings without the upgrades.
But for the hydrant and bus stop corners, agency officials acknowledged they didn't know whether those corners were car-free at the time of the crashes or if someone parked illegally in the space, a widespread occurrence in the Big Apple. The researchers also didn't know whether the collisions happened at the daylit corner or across the street.
So why are there more crashes at these intersections? "Possible explanations" DOT lists are that motorists who aren't walled in by parked cars and can better see a corner might assume that "all risks are known," and drive faster and with less attention, a phenomenon known as "risk compensation," similar to how motorists seeing a cyclist with a helmet drive less safely.
The lack of a parked car at the corner also allows drivers to make tighter turns, the agency wrote, concluding that for this reason, they shouldn't risk taking away the parking spots at every intersection.
"Universal daylighting, as evidenced in DOT’s hydrant zone analysis, does not have the widespread safety benefits anticipated and may have negative effects on safety."
Transportation researchers questioned the logic.
"No city has improved pedestrian infrastructure by blocking visibility at intersections," said Marcel Moran, a Faculty Fellow at New York University's Center for Urban Science and Progress. "It is not consensus in the transportation research field that you’re going to have a safer intersection with a parked car there, and anyone who has done that — had a peer around a parked car — can feel that."
DOT also notes in the fine print that these "hydrant zones" have a "very low-injury" rate on average at just 0.82 a year.
The study also doesn't compare the same block before and after a hydrant or bus stop went in, but to similar corners nearby.
The investigation did compare pre- and post-daylighting for corners with "No Standing" signs and harder infrastructure to keep cars out.
The agency did not simply calculate the percentage change before and after implementation, but used a "quasi-experimental" method known as "difference-in-difference." That means subtracting the change in annual crash rates at those daylit crossings by the changes at nearby intersections that didn't get the treatment during that time.
DOT justified the methodology, writing that the agency wanted to create a control group with the non-daylit intersections as a way to account for local trends, such as large injury declines due to travel patterns changing during Covid-19 lockdowns.
So in a sample of 567 intersections where DOT measured the effects of No Standing signs the average annual injury rate change was not significantly different than at the control group crossings that didn't get parking sign.
For hardened daylighting versus no daylighting at 189 intersections, DOT found the redesign led to a larger decrease injury rates.
The agency noted that hardened daylighting requires more resources, and that other street treatments, such as road narrowings known as neckdowns, are more effective — but that was based on a tiny sample size of just 14 locations.
DOT hardened daylighting at 300 intersections in 2024, according to the report, and has typically added the infrastructure at 100-300 crossings each year as part of street redesigns. That means that the majority of the 1,000 corners Mayor Adams pledged to upgrade last year were without hard protections.
Adams on Thursday proposed increasing the agency's funding for those efforts from $1.38 million a year to $3.85 million, as part of the city's annual budget.
All in the timing
The report was issued as the Council takes up legislation to undo the city's carveout from state law and require DOT to harden 1,000 intersections a year. It has 20 co-sponsors in support.
The bill's sponsor said the law change can't come soon enough.
"I’ve only been in office for three years, and it's so unfortunate, we’ve had multiple children who have died, who have been murdered by traffic violence,” said Julie Won (D–Queens). "That could've been prevented with universal daylighting."
The DOT report was originally required to be published last May, per a previous Council law from 2023, but only now saw the light of day.
Beaton said the timing had nothing to do with the new legislation, saying they wanted to do a "robust study," which "took longer than we had hoped for.
"Our goal is just as soon as we have the information, get it out to public, start the discussion," he said.
Universal daylighting is the floor
More than 40 states have laws banning parking within usually around 20 feet from crosswalks, a common parking regulation standard that dates back to as far as 1923, according to research commissioned by California when the Golden State finally adopted the measure in 2023.
San Francisco logged 14 percent fewer collisions at daylit crossings in its Tenderloin district, while Hoboken registered a 30-percent decline in pedestrian injuries at corners where officials installed flexible plastic posts to keep out cars.
That Square Mile City's former transportation chief who championed the policy did laud the city for recognizing that daylighting works well, but also questioned why they were undermining policy that could help them get to a larger scale.
"Daylighting is not, nor was it ever in any city intended to be, a silver bullet or a tool that on its own can have a major transformative impact on safety for all modes of transportation," said Ryan Sharp, Hoboken's former Director of Transportation and Parking, who last year left government for consulting firm Alta Planning and Design. "Why is the report focused on seemingly trying to push back on daylighting instead of focusing on the positive side of things?"
Sharp said having corners clear of parking by law was essential to the New Jersey city's success in rolling out treatments en masse, because they didn't have to remove "parking" to add improvements, whether it be a low-cost flexible post, built out curbs, or a rain garden that also mitigates flooding.
"Without that universal daylighting law, I can tell you it would have been much more of a battle to do anything with those 25-foot spaces," Sharp said. "That’s more than half the battle in a lot of cases."
Additional reporting by Sophia Lebowitz
