Blocking the Box, Blocking the Walk

Why is it that not getting run over by a driver in a crosswalk is becoming a little much to ask for? Why is it that I’m playing frogger using the crosswalk, weaving around drivers who feel comfortable parking up on the crosswalk, far too close to the pedestrians? Since when did it become okay to stop in the crosswalk, forcing pedestrians, strollers, the elderly and children into active lanes of traffic?

Getting run over by a car is the most inconvenient. It’s not great, to be perfectly honest. If you don’t believe me, you might want to hear the stories of the 98 people who have died due to traffic violence this year. That’s 98 in 2026. In New York City.

But hey, instead of complaining, I should go and do something about it. So I did. I took a photo of a taxi driver who happily stopped well within the crosswalk, and created a 311 complaint. What was supposed to be an open-and-shut case has had no updates in the last 60 days. That driver who forced pedestrians into danger is still out there, presumably putting more pedestrians in danger.

Is it possible that I’m just being dramatic? Turns out, it’s the law. Under the City’s Traffic Rules, 34 RCNY §4-03(a)(3)(i)¹, at a steady red signal:

Vehicular traffic facing such signal shall stop before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersection or, if none, then before entering the intersection and shall remain standing until an indication to proceed is shown.

The rule protects the walking surface specifically:

No operator shall enter an intersection and its crosswalks unless there is sufficient unobstructed space beyond the intersection and its crosswalks in the lane in which he/she is traveling to accommodate the vehicle, notwithstanding any traffic control signal indication to proceed.

The penalty is $115². I’ll come back to this number later.

Forget the law, stopping well before the stop line and the crosswalk is quite literally the first thing a driving examiner takes note of during the test to get a driving licence.

New York is a city of pedestrians, cyclists, transit users, rats, horses, and a whole lot of other things, but one thing it is not, is a city of drivers. The majority of the city do not drive about. In Manhattan, 78.5% of households do not own a vehicle. 62% in the Bronx, and 58.6% in Brooklyn³. This is not a city of cars, it’s a city of people. Then why is it that drivers are allowed so much space and leeway to get away with breaking the law in this city? Why is it that 98 people have died, and more will continue to lose their lives? The NYPD tried to make things better by — checking my notes here — issuing criminal summonses to cyclists, and making Summer Streets an awful experience for everyone involved. Excellent work, carry on!

I’m going to park this fun little statistic here: In 2024, 91,316 collisions were recorded in New York City, in which 9,616 pedestrians were injured and 124 were killed⁴. Among collisions that injured a pedestrian, the most frequently recorded contributing factors were driver inattention or distraction (2,301) and failure to yield right of way (2,165).

Still, there’s an argument to be made here that I’m hyper fixating on this issue. Well, let’s use some of that good old traffic violence and put that argument right to bed here. I put the work in to get some data and the numbers aren’t good. I looked at six intersections in Manhattan (five on Park Avenue and one on 9th Avenue) for 24 hours, from August 12–13. On average, the crosswalk is blocked once every 20 minutes at each intersection. Every 20 minutes, a pedestrian is put at risk of traffic violence because a driver couldn’t be bothered to follow the law.

This is just data from six intersections in Manhattan—six!

The best part about this data? It helped confirm why Park Ave at 34th St is one of the worst intersections to walk across. It always feels like I’m walking through a maze of cars and the data backs it up.

The data also showed just how egregious the infractions here are:

There’s a very real cost of blocking the crosswalk. It forces pedestrians into risking traffic violence. It especially forces our more vulnerable neighbours into an even higher risk of danger. I presume it must not be fun for wheelchair users to mount the curb because a car blocked the access into the sidewalk. What can we do about it? Let’s go back to the $115 fine. There are 150 intersections with a red light camera⁵, which is laughably limited by law. If we used that existing technology to start issuing fines, we’d collect around $450 million a year, if my napkin math checks out. Around $450M from just the 150 intersections! New York City has around 13,500 signalised intersections, so if we did expand this to all intersections, the numbers would make my head spin.

All this to say, I just want to cross the road in peace without the inconvenience of being run over or being put in danger.

Appendix

How did I collect my data? As much as I’d love to camp out with a deck chair and watch traffic with a clipboard, I do have other parts to watch over (blocked bus and bike lanes, I’m coming for you next). I used the openly available NYC DOT traffic cameras (webcams.nyctmc.org) to view the intersections. The cameras are low resolution, which makes identifying any vehicles impossible (by design), and I’m glad it is designed that way. We’ve flocked up enough things and do not need another problem. I used a machine vision tool to make sense of the video frames and that data helped detect the initial set of infractions recorded. I then manually checked every machine ‘flagged’ infraction to ensure I was collecting the data correctly.

AI vs machine learning

No generative AI was used in the detection of the infractions. Open-source, deterministic machine vision libraries were used for the initial infraction screening. I did not train the machine learning model, but it has been trained to detect and differentiate objects.

Everything downstream is deterministic. The geometry is trigonometry. The dwell test is arithmetic on positions. Given the same frames and the same hand-drawn calibration, the pipeline returns the same answer every time.

References

1. 1Traffic Rules, Title 34, Chapter 4 of the Rules of the City of New York. §4-03(a)(3)(i) (steady red signal); §4-07(b)(2) (spillback), quoted verbatim. The Rules are published by American Legal Publishing, which NYC DOT designates as the source of record; the wording above was checked against DOT’s own published Traffic Rules document for Title 34 Chapter 4. https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCrules/0-0-0-63676
2. 2New York City Department of Finance, Parking Violation Codes, NYC Open Data dataset ncbg-6agr. Code 50 (crosswalk) $115; code 52 (intersection) $115; identical for Manhattan 96th St and below and all other areas. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/DOF-Parking-Violation-Codes/ncbg-6agr
3. 3U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2024 1-year estimates. Table B08201 (Household Size by Vehicles Available) and Table B08301 (Means of Transportation to Work), New York County and NYC counties. https://data.census.gov/
4. 4New York City Police Department, Motor Vehicle Collisions – Crashes, NYC Open Data dataset h9gi-nx95. Calendar year 2024: 91,316 collisions; 9,616 pedestrians injured; 124 pedestrians killed. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/Motor-Vehicle-Collisions-Crashes/h9gi-nx95
5. 5New York City Department of Transportation, NYC Red Light Camera Program Reauthorization. Programme restricted to 150 active intersections (“about 1% of signalized intersections”); proposed expansion to 1,325 (“~10%”); nearly 13% decline in right-angle injury crashes comparing three years before and after installation. https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nyc-red-light-camera-program-reauthorization.pdf