Parking is notoriously inconvenient in cities like San Francisco, and it’s not uncommon to see a car parked right next to a crosswalk and think nothing of it. But California passed a parking bill in 2024 prohibiting cars from parking within 20 feet of a crosswalk on the vehicle approach side. For reference, that’s a bit over one parallel parking spot.
If you have not heard of California’s relatively new daylighting law, that’s because many cities including San Francisco have not been enforcing it. The law intends to improve pedestrian safety by ensuring that pedestrians and drivers can see each other before the pedestrian enters the crosswalk. However, not all of these illegal parking areas are marked with a red curb, and some may even still have a parking meter. To remedy this, many cities are making plans to appropriately paint and extend red curbs. San Francisco in particular plans to have all repainting done by 2026, so that drivers can just watch for the red curb instead of having to estimate how far 20 feet is.
As previously stated, drivers in San Francisco do not have to worry about this for now, because SFMTA is not enforcing the daylighting law (unless of course there’s a red curb). This varies by city, though, and San Rafael, San Diego, and Livermore are among other cities that began ticketing drivers for parking in these illegal yet unmarked areas in the beginning of 2025. In the last two months, San Diego issued 4200 tickets to drivers parking too close to the crosswalk. Outside of San Francisco, it’s probably better to be cautious and potentially avoid a hefty fine when driving out of the city.
The law was authored by state assembly member Alex Lee, who asserts that California’s roads have a problem in comparison to other states. Of all states, California has the greatest number of pedestrian deaths on the road, even though the fatality rate here is only 25% higher than the national average. Daylighting might bring that number down a bit; according to Liza Lutzker from UC Berkeley’s Safe Transportation Research and Education Center, “restricting parking near intersections can reduce pedestrian crashes by 30%”.
California is technically very far behind on the issue of daylighting, as 40+ US states have already adopted similar parking policies. Even New York City is trying to phase out parking near crosswalks. California’s concentrated population is going to have a tougher time adapting to even less limited public parking.