How to Daylight Your City’s Intersections (and Why It Matters)

Daylighting is the technical term for a common-sense solution to traffic safety: By removing visual obstructions in approaching intersections, users can better see and more safely cross each other’s paths. The city of Hoboken, New Jersey, which has famously eliminated pedestrian deaths in recent years, has credited daylighting as one of its primary tactics. Other cities executing daylighting projects include San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, while New York City voted this year to adopt a daylighting program in the face of persistent traffic violence.

The National Association of City Transportation Officials, which offers a guide for how and why to pursue daylighting projects, explains, “Intersection design should facilitate eye contact between street users, ensuring that motorists, bicyclists, pedestrians, and transit vehicles intuitively read intersections as shared spaces.”

Daylighting can be done cheaply and creatively with simple materials such as bollards, planters, and bike racks. This checklist from the City of Orlando lists more than 25 materials that can contribute to daylighting projects. Here are some examples of this practice done well across North America.

This intersection in Portland, Oregon, uses a toolkit of daylighting tactics including bike racks, bollards, and rubber mats to protect the entrance to the intersection from a one-way street.

This example in San Francisco uses a protected bike lane and dedicated bus lane to keep visual obstructions at a distance from the intersection.

In Hoboken, simple bollards and paint keep cars from driving or standing where they could obscure visibility (bonus safety points for a single traffic lane and shared bike path).

Tampa is not a particularly pedestrian-friendly city, but this use of curb cuts with planters make this a safer intersection.

Daylighting can also be done with some creativity, like this intersection in Baltimore protected by bollards and a striking paint scheme that continues into the crosswalks.

Daylighting is one of those things that once you notice it, you can’t unsee it. Please share any good examples you’ve encountered in comments below or by tagging us on social. And if you want to learn more about how to make your city or town’s streets safer, check out our 2024 Local-Motive Course, “Turn That Stroad Into a Street (or Road).”

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Ben Abramson

Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.