California passed a law recently – AB 413 – to remove parking at intersections across the state to provide better visibility and ostensibly improve pedestrian and driver safety, in addition to improving citation income. Per KPBS at time of implentation in January of 2025: “Citations will cost $65, plus a state-mandated administrative fee of $12.50, for a total of $77.50 — also the fine for parking at a red curb in the city.”
San Diego has received criticism for enforcing these rules without painting curbs red, which seems unfair and unexpected to my mind for both residents or visitors to town. A friend recently received a ticket under this rule for parking in a non-painted spot proximate to an unmarked crossing. I was surprised that the ticket totaled $115.50 – a 49% increase in a year from the $77.50 referenced by KPBS. Maybe that sort of increase is just the norm in California these days for taxes and fees?
Outside of being surprised by the much higher citation amount I also hadn’t seen any robust study on the actual safety improvement record of day lighting. To my mind I would think wider view planes for drivers would result in higher speeds and harder turns, possibly reducing safety in general.
I looked around a bit and and the NYC DOT released a report in January 2025 on daylighting with a lot of info. The images below are from the report which can be found here. From the report there is a non statistically significant increase in safety and doing a back test using fire hydrants as a proxy showed a 30% increase in injuries. The NYC document references other places as well:
Portland – No before-after analysis of injuries or fatalities
Seattle – The city does not publish safety benefit analysis metrics for this process
Hoboken – The city has not published a before-after analysis of the specific
effects of daylighting on safety
San Francisco (Tenderloin) – No data was available on injury reductions. (The city reported a 14% decrease in collisions at intersections where treatments were implemented.)
Daylighting with bollards or other structures can improve safety
Other Road Changes Improve Safety More (But likely cost more)
Analysis of Hydrant Zones (similar to daylighting) show a 30% higher injury rate
So what is the overall outcome of daylighting implementation in San Diego?
– Loss of 4,000 parking spots in the city (my estimate, probably way too low). Based on estimate of 16,000 intersections and then conservatively reducing that by half and again by half assuming some intersections will not have all four corners impacted. Then assigning a value of $2 per day to each spot times 365 days a year. $2 is Schrodinger’s Parking Rate – it’s both much too high (City charges zero) and much too low (residents would pay much more to secure). Very, very rough numbers but seem quite conservative to me and yield $2,920,000 in reduced value to users.
– Loss of $850,000 from drivers / Gain of $850,000 for City / State (estimated in budget for July 2025 – June 2026 in IBA report)
– Increase in safety? Decrease? Unknown.
