Every day I cross a corner in Jackson Heights where I can’t see anything until I’m already in the street. There’s a van or an SUV parked right up at the curb, so I edge out past the bumper and hope nobody’s coming around the turn. The kids walking to school do the same thing. So do the older people on my block, who have a lot less room to be wrong about it than I do.

The fix is called daylighting. You keep cars off the few feet right next to a crosswalk so that drivers and people on foot can actually see each other. The driver turning the corner can see the kid stepping off the curb; the kid can see the car.

New York State already bans parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk and most of the state follows it. But the law lets a city opt out with its own signs and markings, and New York City opted out everywhere. By default you can park right up to the corner.

Multiple people have died because of this issue. 2025 was the safest year on NYC streets since 1910, and more than half the people killed were on foot.

The solution here is actually astonishingly easy. The Department of Transportation can kind of do whatever it wants with the streets of New York. If they decided this was important, they could start implementing this today!

However, the DOT put out a study claiming that pulling parking off a corner can make it more dangerous. They say that when drivers can see more, they speed up and pay less attention. But then the City Council’s data team tore it apart. Half the “daylighted” corners DOT measured weren’t actually clear. They still had bus stops or hydrants or cars parked illegally right in the sightline.

But even the DOT’s own studies admit that there is a version that does work; they call it hardened daylighting, which just means that something solid is put in the gap. I’d love to see them put in bike racks, but you could put in a bollard or a granite block or even a bench. Hoboken did this years ago as part of their “Vision Zero” and went long stretches without a single traffic death.

Obviously this means this fight isn’t just about if daylighting is effective. It’s about parking. Estimates have shown that universal daylighting would remove 300,000 parking spots in the city.

Councilmember Julie Won introduced Intro 1138 to end corner parking citywide and make DOT harden at least 1,000 intersections a year. It got 32 co-sponsors and then died when the session ran out. It’s back now as Intro 511, sitting in the Transportation Committee, where most bills die.

The City Council’s bill would be a good forcing function because City Hall has shown weak commitment to daylighting. Even though candidate Mamdani was a strong proponent of universal hardened daylighting, Mayor Mamdani has not prioritized it. Mamdani’s budget would fund only about 500 corners per year. That’s 0.16% of eligible corners in the city.

If you want to do something about it, you can:

  • Call 311 or bring a specific intersection to your Community Board’s transportation committee and say exactly what makes it dangerous: the school, the seniors, the blind turn, the near-misses you’ve watched happen. DOT picks corners by danger and by who’s asking, and asking moves you up the list.
  • Email your Council Member with one ask: co-sponsor Intro 511 and don’t back a weakened version. It takes five minutes, and the sponsor count is the thing leadership actually watches.