Staten Island Eyes Select Right-on-Red Turns, DOT Study May Offer Data-Driven Detour

As New York’s most car-dependent borough pushes to loosen traffic rules, the perennial contest between speed and safety takes on renewed importance for city residents and policymakers alike.

On a cold December morning this year, engines idle at the intersection of Amboy Road and Huguenot Avenue. Schoolchildren stream across with backpacks slung low, while drivers gaze longingly at the red light barring their right turns. Here, the daily tension between expediency and caution is palpable—one that has now found new voice in the form of Councilmember Frank Morano’s latest legislative salvo.

Last month, Mr Morano, a Republican representing Staten Island, introduced a bill urging New York City’s Department of Transportation (DOT) to study scrapping the local ban on right turns at red lights—at least at specific intersections in his borough. New York City is unusual among American cities in its prohibition: outside its borders, turning right after a stop at a red light is a mundane ritual. Yet to Staten Island’s drivers, the rule seems anomalous, an urban relic ill-suited to their car-heavy, comparatively sprawling enclave.

Mr Morano’s proposal is measured, as legislative overtures go. Rather than call for borough-wide changes, his bill asks the DOT to identify locations where sightlines, traffic flows, and pedestrian patterns might safely permit the move. He has pointed to intersections in Annadale, such as Amboy and Huguenot, and outside several schools, as potential candidates. The transportation department itself notes that of the 305 intersections citywide currently permitting right-on-red, 186 are in Staten Island—leaving much of the borough still under the stricter regime.

The response among locals has been, in the city’s best tradition, robustly divided. Some, like Tony Forna, reckon the current ban paradoxically encourages reckless, last-second lunges for the turn. Others, including worried parents such as Christine Devito, warn that any relaxation near schools risks putting young pedestrians in harm’s way. These are not theoretical concerns: the Annadale junction cited by the councillor sits adjacent to Tottenville High and the Richard H. Hungerford School, magnets for hundreds of pupils twice daily.

The first-order implications for New York are thus fraught with trade-offs both familiar and acute. For drivers—an overwhelming majority on Staten Island—the patchy right-on-red exemption bodes well for shaving precious minutes off commutes. The borough’s transit malaise is storied; public transit is notoriously tepid, and car ownership virtually compulsory. The inconvenience of idling at a deserted intersection when, across the Hudson, New Jerseyans gleefully roll through after a perfunctory pause, rankles.

Yet the spectre of increased danger for pedestrians looms. New York’s Vision Zero road-safety campaign remains a political lodestar, even as traffic fatalities stubbornly resist decline. Opponents of Morano’s proposal point to data from cities nationwide associating right-on-red turns with a higher incidence of pedestrian and cyclist collisions. The DOT’s caution is therefore understandable; urban streets, especially near schools, are not merely conduits for cars but shared spaces in which a moment’s inattention can yield grievous consequences.

Second-order effects ripple outward. If the pilot succeeds—and spreads—New Yorkers may face a city beset by even more complicated patchworks of traffic rules, varying borough to borough or block to block, eroding the cohesive simplicity that has underpinned road safety policy for decades. Legal ambiguities rarely bode well for enforcement. Nor would this be the first time Staten Island has chafed against citywide mandates. A precedent for “borough exceptionalism,” if established, could buoy similar claims elsewhere, from zoning codes to speed limits.

There are economic considerations too. For retail and logistics, any decrease in journey times offers modest, potentially cumulative, productivity gains. But there is also a cost: an uptick, however marginal, in crashes is not only a humanitarian concern but also a drain on the city’s already strained emergency resources. Insurance rates may edge up. The externalities—borne by society at large, not merely by motorists—demand reckoning.

The debate is not unique to New York. Across the United States, right-on-red has become a symbol of car-first urban design, heralded in the 1970s as a fuel-saving measure during oil shocks, but now the focus of renewed scrutiny amid a surge in pedestrian deaths. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and beyond, cities with high pedestrian activity and dense streetscapes have begun to reconsider whether the practice fits contemporary urban reality. Globally, the right-on-red is largely frowned upon; much of Europe, with its ancient, human-scaled city grids, forbids it entirely save for rare exceptions.

A peculiarity of place

That Staten Island feels itself the exception among exceptions is hardly surprising. Its population density, about a third that of the Bronx, and landscape of broken street grids and arterial roads aligns it more closely with outlying American suburbs than with Manhattan’s gridlocked core. But a borough’s logistical woes should not be conflated with inevitability. Cities from Amsterdam to Seoul have shown, often to grudging local surprise, that reducing vehicle priority need not portend urban paralysis.

It would be glib to dismiss Mr Morano’s overture as mere political performance. Staten Island has reason to bristle at one-size-fits-all policies crafted with Manhattan or Brooklyn in mind. Nor do all corners bristle with after-school chaos; there are sleepy intersections where a more permissive rule may have negligible cost to safety.

But the fundamental calculus remains: in cities, safety for the most vulnerable road users ought to outweigh convenience for the rest. Data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggest that right-on-red accounts for a paltry share of overall crashes, but the ones that do occur more often involve pedestrians—many of them children. The dollar value of saved minutes may be dwarfed by the human cost of even a single avoidable injury.

We reckon a scrupulously designed, well-monitored pilot—capitalising on the city’s ability to harvest fine-grained traffic data—could offer a way forward. But political haste, or a simplistic “if-it-works-elsewhere” approach, would be unwise. Staten Island is not New Jersey, and New York’s reputation for prioritising pedestrian life, even at the risk of frustrating drivers, remains worth defending.

As New York weighs whether to loosen a rarefied rule, a careful balance should be struck—one rooted in deference to evidence rather than to expedience or parochial pressure. Only then can the city claim to be putting both safety and sense first. ■