City Council Takes Another Swing at ‘Daylighting’ Bill to Ban Corner Parking

City lawmakers are reviving legislation to ban parking at street corners, a design for better visibility known as daylighting, after Mayor Mamdani wavered on his campaign promise to implement the policy.

Last December, former City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and former Mayor Eric Adams teamed up to kill a daylighting bill sponsored by Council Member Julie Won (D-Queens). Won now believes the current Council has a better chance at enacting the life-saving law under Adrienne Adams’s successor, Julie Menin (D-Upper East Side).

“We have to pass this law no matter what, because clearly, people change their mind, and once you legislate, it doesn’t matter if they change their mind, they got to abide by the law,” Queens Council Member Julie Won told Streetsblog at a rally outside City Hall on Friday morning. “We’ve had conversations with [Speaker Menin], and we believe that she wants to make sure that it passes.”

Won’s proposal, Intro 511, prohibits parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk anywhere in the five boroughs. This is already the law in the rest of the New York State, but Albany has long exempted the state’s biggest city from following it. The legislation would also require the Department of Transportation to install hard barriers at 1,000 corners per year, and advocates are pushing the city to earmark $15 million in this year’s budget to fund that effort.

“I voted for Zohran Mamdani, and he promised us universal daylighting,” Won said at the rally ahead of a Council budget oversight hearing on transportation. “I still have hope that the mayor will wake up today, will hear our voices, will see our beautiful faces on the steps of City Hall … and say that, ‘All right, I remember again, I woke up from my amnesia, I do support universal daylighting.'”

The legislation has drawn 25 co-sponsors thus far — just short of a majority in the 51-member legislative body. If Mamdani continues to oppose the measure, however, the bill would need a two-thirds super-majority to overcome his mayoral veto. Menin signed onto a previous version of the bill, a spokesperson noted, but the rep declined to say whether the Council’s leader supports the new one.

“The Council has proudly supported expanding the use of daylighting to make our streets safer and save lives from traffic violence,” said Benjamin Fang-Estrada in a statement. “Introduction 511 was introduced in January and will go through the Council’s legislative process, which allows for thorough public engagement and input.”

The previous bill died in the Council last year after then-Speaker Adams blocked the effort, despite garnering a majority of support among lawmakers. The top lawmaker cut the bill from a vote scheduled for the Council’s final session in 2025, after the proposal had lingered in legislative limbo for more than a year.

The Council battle followed a hard-fought, grassroots push inspired by the deaths of several children. In 2023, drivers killed a 7-year-old girl in Queens and a 7-year-old boy in Brooklyn. Both died while trying to cross streets with poor visibility.

Many of the city’s typically car-friendly community boards subsequently passed symbolic resolutions for universal daylighting and local politicians signed letters demanding the same. Among the signatories was then-Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani.

But DOT leaders have long opposed universal daylighting, arguing that a corner is safer when a car is parked right up against the crosswalk, because it keeps drivers from making sharp turns – a supposed protection that evaporates any time a motorist leaves a corner spot empty. DOT officials have said they need to retain their power to add daylighting where they see fit, preferably with hardened infrastructure, like concrete blocks, bike racks and plastic bollards.

As a mayoral candidate, Mamdani vowed to implement universal daylighting and disregard this bureaucratic resistance, but has so far deferred to his DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn, who backed off on his boss’s promise of clearing corners citywide earlier this year.

From Hong Kong to Hoboken, other municipalities have shown that daylighting makes streets safer. That shouldn’t be a surprise: Intersections are the deadliest part of the street for pedestrians, accounting for 59 percent of pedestrian deaths and 77 percent of pedestrian injuries, according to DOT.

“Daylighting is simple, it works, and it saves lives – so don’t tell me there’s something Hoboken can do that New York can’t,” said the Council’s Transportation Committee Chair Shaun Abreu at the rally ahead of a Council budget oversight hearing. “Every day we wait, another life is put at risk.”

As Won’s previous daylighting bill gained momentum last year, DOT officials released a report that questioned the practice’s safety benefits in the absence of hardened protections like granite blocks or plastic posts. Agency officials testified that they found increased rates of injury at some intersections that had hydrants near corners.

The agency’s report admitted that it had “limitations,” and an internal Council review eviscerated the study for relying on shoddy data.

DOT also tried to scare politicians by adding a whopping $3-billion price tag to the proposed law change, and – even worse for the city’s car-focused pols – emphasizing that daylighting would reclaim 300,000 parking spots across the city’s roughly 40,000 intersections.

Under former Mayor Eric Adams, the city’s Office of Management and Budget estimated the cost of the bill at around $16.7 million per year to harden 1,000 daylit intersections, or about $17,000 per crossing. That includes $8.7 million for barriers and other materials and around $6.7 million in staffing. The Council separately estimated the cost at only $9.9 million per year.

Hoboken, just across the Hudson River, daylit its intersections for as little as $1,500 each by relying on paint and plastic bollards, which cost about $40 a pop. Planners could scale their designs up with bike racks for about $2,000 per intersection, or as much as $30,000 for a full rebuild with a concrete bumpout.

In the meantime, Won still holds out hope that Mamdani’s DOT will abandon its opposition to universal daylighting. “The Department of Transportation is very against this bill for very silly reasons, which we debunked,” she said.