NEW YORK CITY — New York City has a clear-as-day solution to reducing traffic deaths: become more like Hoboken.
Or so say members of 10 community boards — and counting — across the city that have recently passed resolutions in support of universal “daylighting,” the elimination of all parking spaces near intersections to improve visibility.
The proof of daylighting’s effectiveness in reducing traffic deaths is in Hoboken’s pudding, said Jackson Chabot, director of advocacy and advocacy for Open Plans.
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Hoboken hasn’t had a traffic death in the seven years since its leaders adopted universal daylighting, in addition to a suite of other steps, Chabot said.
“It is common sense, it is well-received,” he said.
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And “well-received” may well be understatement, at least based on a growing movement of community boards vocally pressing city leaders to scrap parking spots near intersections.
‘A blind spot’
Daylighting isn’t a new idea.
Any New Yorker, whether pedestrian, cyclist or motorist, knows the difficulty of seeing around a car parked at the edge of an intersection.
Those sight-blocking cars can lead to daily heart-stopping near misses and, often, serious injuries and fatal crashes such as the one that killed 3-year-old Quintas Chen in Queens— an issue most recently highlighted in a letter by Queens Council Member Shekar Krishnan and other elected officials to the city’s Department of Transportation.
“Daylighting removes a blind spot so that vehicles have more lead-time and a broader view to spot pedestrians at corners and crosswalks, and likewise allows people walking and biking to see oncoming traffic sooner, increasing safety for all,” the letter states.
The issue in New York City is that city officials have opted out of a state law that prohibits parking within 20 feet of an intersection.
The opt-out means that parking spots in New York City often come very close to crosswalks, unless those spaces have been restricted in some way.
Back in November, Mayor Eric Adams committed to daylight 1,000 intersections this year. Advocates hailed the move, even as they pointed out, the pledge only covers 2.5 percent of intersections in the city. Months later, those same advocates say they’re still waiting for concrete information from the city on how many promised daylighting projects have been completed.
They also have increasingly pointed toward New York City’s New Jersey neighbor, Hoboken, as a model for a better path.
Traffic deaths have dropped to zero in Hoboken since 2017, when city leaders removed intersection parking spaces and adopted other street safety measures. The city is now a “national model for roadway safety,” as highlighted by a recent Associated Press report.
But it should be noted that Hoboken’s traffic deaths weren’t exactly high to begin with.
The city had one traffic death in each of 2015, 2016, and 2017, and none at all in 2014, according to New Jersey state police statistics.
The mile-square city did see an 18 percent drop in injury crashes, and a 62 percent reduction in serious injuries from 2022 to 2023, Patch reported.
Still, Hoboken’s success in dropping deaths and injuries shows how universal daylighting could be a fix for New York City to try, said Paul Krikler, a city resident with a self-professed interest in street safety.
“For me, it’s a very straightforward argument about daylighting,” he said.
But any change, he noted, has to come from Adams’ administration.
“It’s simply got to be the city decides it wants to do something about it,” Krikler said.
‘This benefits everyone’
Advocates such as Chabot in recent months have increasingly seen community boards as fertile ground to rally support for universal daylighting.
Car owners, who often decry the loss of any on-street parking spots, make up large swaths of community board members, Chabot said.
Unexpectedly, he said they’ve overwhelmingly been supportive so far.
The 10 New York City community boards in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens that passed daylighting resolutions — most recently Manhattan’s Community Board 7 — did so either unanimously or nearly unanimously, Chabot said. Altogether, the 10 community boards represent 1.5 million people, he said.
“We’re really seeing this as an issue where the tide is turning,” Chabot said.
Advocates hope in coming months that community boards in The Bronx and Staten Island will pass similar resolutions.
Lucia Deng, municipal service chair of Community Board 5 in The Bronx, said her own board is likely to vote on such a resolution this spring.
She herself owns a car — unlike roughly 70 percent of her neighbors in CB5. But she said the safety benefits of daylighting are clear.
“This benefits everyone, when you weigh that against the loss of parking spots per intersection … I think the benefit greatly outweighs the loss of a couple parking spaces,” she said.
The resolutions themselves aren’t binding, meaning they’re largely symbolic. But advocates hope they could pressure City Hall officials to adopt a daylighting initiative that will sweep across the city’s 40,000 intersections.
“I really think it’s a bellwether for the future,” Chabot said.
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