Day: September 7, 2025

In 2020, a 10-year-old boy was killed by a truck driver while walking to school with his mother in Corona, Queens. In 2021, a driver killed one child and seriously injured another in front of a school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.

In 2022, a 15-year-old girl was killed by a school bus driver in front of James Madison High School in Sheepshead Bay. In 2023, 7-year-old Kamari Hughes was killed by an NYPD tow truck driver while walking to school with his mother in Fort Greene. In 2024, a 10-year-old girl was killed by a driver after leaving school in South Williamsburg.

These heartbreaking stories reflect an unsettling truth: our city has not yet built streets that are safe for children. As a father to school-aged boys, I share the deep anxiety so many other New York parents hold that one day my kids won’t make it home safely.

But I also have hope, because right now, Speaker Adams has the opportunity to bring a life-saving street safety intervention to every street in our city by advancing Intro 1138 to make universal daylighting the law in New York City.

Daylighting – reclaiming one parking spot adjacent to crosswalks to improve visibility for drivers and pedestrians – is a simple and effective treatment that makes streets safer. Whether you’re walking your kids to school, biking to work, or driving to the store, daylighting makes navigating city streets easier.

When visibility is improved, drivers can better understand the points of conflict at an intersection, make smart decisions as they approach, slow down if something unexpected happens, and easily avoid crashes.

This intervention is proven to work and is already a street safety convention across the United States. Forty-four states have universal daylighting laws, and it’s even the law here in New York State. New York City has simply been allowed to opt out of the law, despite the intervention being a best practice in street safety.

In fact, just across the Hudson River in Hoboken, NJ, elected officials credit universal daylighting as a main reason why the city hasn’t seen a traffic fatality in eight and a half years. Globally, world-leading cities are also leaning into daylighting. Paris, for example, has pledged to daylight every intersection in the city with physical infrastructure by 2026.

The best thing about universal daylighting is that it is a systemic solution to a systemic problem. It’s unacceptable that our status quo is waiting for deaths to happen before we respond instead of actively trying to prevent them. Rather than fixing intersections where fatalities have occurred using a piecemeal approach, universal daylighting delivers improved visibility to every intersection in the city. Parents in every borough will get as much peace of mind as I will in Brooklyn.

This is important because historically, safety treatments are not used equitably across New York City. More pedestrians and motorists were killed this year in Brooklyn than in any other borough. This holds true for child deaths. Of the six children killed by drivers in 2025, four were killed in Brooklyn.

Intro 1138 would mandate that all intersections in New York City be daylighted and require physical infrastructure to be added to 1,000 intersections a year. The bill has broad bipartisan support from a majority of council members, including members from all five boroughs. The bill also aligns with my 2025 Comprehensive Plan for Brooklyn, which calls for the implementation of universal daylighting and the use of physical barriers to daylight all intersections in Brooklyn. As of September 2024, there were only 45 daylighted intersections in Brooklyn.

Daylighting should be considered a basic design standard for every intersection in the city; every time a work crew touches a street corner is an opportunity to rebuild it with daylighting. There is no reason to delay implementing this life-saving policy or for any parent to grieve another preventable death. No parking space is more important than a life.

As a father, I want what every parent in this city wants – the peace of mind of knowing my child is safe and will return home at the end of the day. We cannot accept a city where every school morning brings with it the risk of tragedy. This is an opportunity to create a legacy of lasting, meaningful change in New York City, and one that only the Speaker has the power to deliver.

Speaker Adrienne Adams must bring Intro 1138 to a vote and ensure it passes with a veto-proof majority.

Antonio Reynoso is Brooklyn borough president.