Think N.Y.C.’s Roads Are Crowded? Good Luck on the Sidewalks.
"A researcher has measured how “claustrophobic” New York’s sidewalks are by gathering data on all of the people, benches, trash cans, bus shelters, bicycle racks and clutter in the way.
This is Street Wars, a weekly series on the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.
Any New Yorker who regularly walks around the city quickly learns which sidewalks are a pleasure to navigate and which are more like obstacle courses. Some are wide enough to stroll two, maybe three people across. Some are so narrow and crowded that it’s easier to just walk in the street, despite the danger.
Matthew Franchi, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Cornell University, wanted to see if it was possible to use data to determine which sidewalks were, in fact, the most and least “claustrophobic” across the city.
Claustrophobic sidewalks, by Franchi’s definition, are those that have many pedestrians and city structures such as bus stop shelters (2,030 in Queens, for example), trash cans (more than 9,600 in Manhattan), bicycle racks (more than 12,000 in Brooklyn), trees (more than 151,000 in Staten Island) and fire hydrants (more than 15,000 in the Bronx). He was able to track those factors using data from the city and images from dash cameras used widely by ride-share drivers.
Perhaps to no one’s surprise, Franchi found that the Times Square area of Midtown was the neighborhood with the most claustrophobic sidewalks; it was more than seven times more claustrophobic than the city average. Greenwich Village, Gramercy, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope also made the list of the top 25 most claustrophobic neighborhoods for pedestrians. Jamaica Bay, Great Kills-Eltingville in Staten Island and Fort Hamilton were among the 25 least claustrophobic neighborhoods, according to his research.
Franchi, who came up with the idea during an unpleasant walk off West Fourth Street in the West Village, said the results “aligned with my mental perception of what the ordering would be because the top one was Times Square, and that was a hellscape.”
On a recent afternoon, the stretch of sidewalk along Seventh Avenue in Manhattan between 34th and 42nd Streets was dominated by travelers rolling suitcases, slow-moving tourists, fruit and hat vendors, newsstands, commuters, and a number of men carting large boxes from trucks into buildings. In other words, reliably crowded.
Anaiyah Glover, 22, said that she purposely avoided Times Square because of the crowds. She was in the area only for a job opportunity.
“If you live in New York, you know 42nd is just crowded,” said Ms. Glover, who lives in the Bronx. “It’s the tourist attraction. There’s so many people, no matter what time it is, too.”
She said she much preferred to walk on Fifth Avenue, especially in the spring because of the flowers, and in Hudson River Park.
“That’s another kind of, like, crowded area, but there is still enough space to kind of walk everywhere,” she said.
Kelly Pedraza works in Times Square and has figured out ways to avoid the foot traffic, which at times includes taking the bus. She said if she had to choose anywhere to walk in the city, it would be in Long Island City near the East River.
“It has a beautiful view of the city, and everything is more relaxing,” she said, while acknowledging that sometimes it gets crowded there, too.
Franchi’s project relied on data from New York City’s OpenData database on its sidewalks, which he said is updated weekly. The data includes where bus stops, trash cans, benches, bicycle parking shelters, trees, newsstands, parking meters and other structures are placed.
Franchi also analyzed nine million dash cam images from 2023 pulled by Nexar, a company that manufactures dash cameras, which many Uber and Lyft drivers have. He used software to detect pedestrians in the photographs and then determined the number of pedestrians per foot of sidewalk width during a typical of day of traffic in the city in 2023.
He also visited sidewalks in person and saw some places that were so crowded that people opted to walk into the road instead.
“I’ve begun to see that parts of Manhattan are just becoming too crowded, but I’m not sure how to fix that beyond just increasing things like public transportation,” Franchi said, adding that there were too many places where cars had more space than pedestrians.
Certain areas outside of Manhattan, including in Jackson Heights in Queens and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, appeared to have foot traffic that was almost worse than areas in Manhattan, in part because they also had bustling commercial areas, Franchi said.
The data could help people with mobility impairments better map out their routes, Franchi said. And if, in the future, New York comes to rely on food or package delivery robots, the sidewalk congestion study could help them move more easily around the city. But, Franchi said, there is also a risk of the data being used to expedite gentrification by encouraging people to move to areas to which they wouldn’t ordinarily travel because they appear less congested.
Franchi also acknowledged that the data had its limits. About 36 percent of the areas he sought to analyze did not have available dash cam data, mostly in Staten Island and the outer reaches of other boroughs. Those areas are more residential, so people were likely to have their own cars instead of relying on ride-share services.
Also, the city’s data also does not take into account every sort of sidewalk structure. For instance, it does not include streetlights, fire department alarm boxes, cellar doors that open onto the sidewalk, plant beds, street-side produce markets or package drop-off containers. So it’s possible some areas are more claustrophobic than captured in the research.
Franchi referred to the structures included in his research as “clutter,” while noting that some clutter is more objectionable than others. Pedestrians don’t typically object to trees and benches; scaffolding is another story. Franchi gave each item of clutter a weight, depending on its size. Bus stops, for example, had a weight of 2, while trees and parking meters had a 0.15 weight.
Of course, what’s claustrophobic for one person may feel completely comfortable for another, and vice versa, Franchi said.
But, he added, “I think it’s cool if you live in New York City to kind of see what your home, neighborhood or third places look like from the perspective of how claustrophobic they are.”
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Finland has figured out how to reduce traffic deaths
In New York and in cities across the country, public safety advocates have been working to drive traffic fatalities down to zero. In Helsinki, Finland, it nearly happened.
In 2019, Helsinki, a city of 630,000 people, recorded zero pedestrian or cyclist deaths, and just one person was killed in a car. Since then, according to city data, figures have hovered around one or two pedestrian or cyclist deaths per year, with annual traffic deaths remaining below 10.
In the 1970s, when Helsinki averaged 50 to 60 fatalities per year, the speed limit on most streets was about 50 kilometers per hour, or about 30 miles per hour. By 2019, the most common speed limit was 30 k.p.h., or 18 m.p.h. — slower than those in many American school zones.
Alongside reductions in speed and the expansion of transit and bike lanes, Helsinki has a fleet of cameras to catch traffic scofflaws. It also narrowed the width of streets (about 10 to 11 feet in Helsinki, compared with 12 feet in American cities), making it more challenging for cars to comfortably cruise.
Dr. Jani Unkuri, a pediatric surgeon at the New Children’s Hospital in Helsinki who also studies traffic-related deaths, credits Finland’s success to its use of data to inform policy.
In Finland, every traffic death is investigated by a team of police officers, vehicle specialists, engineers, physicians and psychologists. The inspectors diagnose the cause of each death and then recommend a plan to prevent future fatalities: alterations to road design or vehicle safety requirements.
Those reports help Finnish cities find solutions. Espoo, a suburban city of 300,000 that neighbors Helsinki, recorded zero road deaths over the past year, the largest community in the world to do so. Finland aims to reach zero traffic fatalities nationwide by 2050, and it’s currently halfway through a four-year plan to inch closer. Helsinki, also, is partway through its own four-year plan and is looking to halve deaths and injuries by 2030 compared with 2020 totals.
“Road safety is no different from a construction site,” said Pasi Anteroinen, the managing director of the Finnish Road Safety Council. “You really need to know who’s doing what and what the timing is and have somebody responsible for each of the chores. It’s not rocket science.”
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