The Children of New York City Deserve Universal Daylighting

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Streetsblog reported on Tuesday that outgoing City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams will block the Council from voting on Intro 1138, which would mandate universal daylighting in New York City. Supporters of the bill were outraged, so today we are publishing the following essay by two of the bill’s sponsors.

Imagine you’re driving up to an intersection. You’re approaching the crosswalk. To your right, there’s an SUV blocking your line of sight. To your left, there’s a pickup truck doing the same. Someone might be hidden behind either of them. What if they’re starting to cross the street? You would have no idea, and now you’re on a collision course to a life-altering or even deadly crash.

By requiring that parked vehicles on this street be moved back from the crosswalk, no longer obscuring lines of sight, you would be able to see the pedestrian — and the pedestrian could see you! But most intersections in New York City make this impossible.

That’s why we’re fighting to pass Intro 1138, a bill in the City Council that would daylight every intersection in New York City. It enjoys widespread support from community boards representing a majority of New Yorkers, including in areas that depend on cars like CB6 in Forest Hills and CB13 in Southeast Queens — because daylighting makes intersections safer for everyone, including drivers.

The Council has already taken a step toward this goal, passing Local Law 66, which requires DOT to daylight 100 intersections per year. But the city has tens of thousands of intersections, so most of them would remain unsafe for many years. Intro 1138 would accelerate the daylighting process, and require the DOT to daylight 1,000 intersections with hardened infrastructure every year. This would mean more benches on a bus route, greenery on a hot street, or rain gardens to reduce flooding from big storms. It would mean saving lives.

Daylighting is common sense: drivers and pedestrians shouldn’t be invisible to one another. And in most other places, they aren’t. 46 states, including the rest of New York State outside of the five boroughs, have daylighting. It is already in effect and working safely in cities as pedestrian-friendly as Paris, as car-dependent as Houston, as large and dense as Tokyo, as comparable as Chicago, and in Vision Zero leaders like Stockholm. Nearby Hoboken, which enforces universal daylighting, has avoided all traffic deaths for more than eight years.

Here in New York City, car drivers kill 250 New Yorkers every year, and a majority of those crashes happen at intersections. Why don’t we deserve the same protections as the rest of New York State?

This fight is personal for us. As mothers, our worst nightmare is a car killing a child just for trying to cross the street. The youngest New Yorkers can’t be seen behind the hoods of increasingly larger vehicles — and they can’t see the car that might be barreling down the street toward them. Kids are the city’s most vulnerable residents, and the status quo endangers them. The children of New York City deserve better. They deserve universal daylighting.

Imagine now that you’re driving up to an intersection that’s properly daylit with clear sight-lines. Maybe a young student, or a grandmother, or someone in a wheelchair starts to cross. You can see them before they reach the middle of the street, and they can see you before they step off the curb. Thanks to this visibility, everyone gets home safely. We can build safer streets and better crossings for everyone — by passing Intro 1138 now.