How dashcams revealed 10% of sidewalk sheds are illegal

Built to protect pedestrians from falling debris, the ubiquitous sidewalk shed has become an unfortunate defining feature of New York City life.And while we can applaud the new, improved designs for these eyesores, we need to get smarter about how to keep fewer of them up and for shorter periods of time.Simply making sidewalk sheds prettier is merely putting “lipstick on a pig” — no offense to pigs.We can do better.As of last year, the city had more than 8,000 active sidewalk shed permits on file. More than 400 have been up for more than half a decade; an infamous one in Harlem was up for 21 years before finally being taken down in 2023.What was meant to be temporary safety infrastructure has metastasized into a chronic urban condition.They block light, hide storefronts, limit accessibility for people with disabilities and provide cover for rats, trash and illicit activity.And they’re ugly.The last administration vowed to “Get Sheds Down,” but good intentions alone haven’t dismantled a broken system that is just too slow and bureaucratic.We’re hoping the Mamdani administration sees the problem isn’t just about prettier steel poles and plywood; it’s about data.Currently, the Department of Buildings lacks an up-to-date, comprehensive picture of which sheds are up, which are expired and which were never permitted in the first place.Scaffold inspections remain manual, complaint-driven and slow.Data on something as visible and dynamic as scaffolding is astonishingly static.Researchers at Cornell Tech have a novel solution.A team led by Prof.

Wendy Ju used 29 million dashboard-camera images provided by Nexar, Inc.to “fingerprint” New York’s scaffolding problem.Nexar’s images come from the vantage of thousands of vehicles equipped with cameras, mostly ridesharing vehicles.By training an artificial-intelligence model to detect scaffolds in street-level images and matching them with DOB permit data, the team was able to map where sidewalk shed...