{"id":134151,"date":"2026-02-15T10:15:21","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T10:15:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/134151\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T10:15:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T10:15:21","slug":"how-to-shed-those-ugly-sheds-and-see-paradise-by-the-dashboard-camera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/134151\/","title":{"rendered":"How to shed those ugly sheds \u2014 and see paradise by the dashboard camera"},"content":{"rendered":"

Built to protect pedestrians from falling debris, the ubiquitous sidewalk shed<\/a> has become an unfortunate defining feature of New York City life.<\/p>\n

And while we can applaud the new, improved designs for these eyesores<\/a>, we need to get smarter about how to keep fewer of them up and for shorter periods of time.<\/p>\n

Simply making sidewalk sheds prettier is merely putting \u201clipstick on a pig\u201d \u2014 no offense to pigs. We can do better.<\/p>\n

As of last year, the city had more than 8,000 active\u00a0sidewalk shed permits on file.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

What was meant to be temporary safety infrastructure has metastasized into a chronic urban condition.<\/p>\n

They block light, hide storefronts, limit accessibility for people with disabilities<\/a> and provide cover for rats, trash and illicit activity.<\/p>\n

And they\u2019re ugly.<\/p>\n

The last administration vowed to \u201cGet Sheds Down,\u201d but good intentions alone haven\u2019t dismantled a broken system that is just too slow and bureaucratic.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re hoping the Mamdani administration sees the problem isn\u2019t just about prettier steel poles and plywood; it\u2019s about data.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Scaffold inspections remain manual, complaint-driven and slow.<\/p>\n

Data on something as visible and dynamic as scaffolding is astonishingly static.<\/p>\n

Researchers at Cornell Tech have a novel solution<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A team led by Prof. Wendy Ju used 29 million dashboard-camera images provided by Nexar, Inc. to \u201cfingerprint\u201d New York\u2019s scaffolding problem.<\/p>\n

Nexar\u2019s images come from the vantage of thousands of vehicles equipped with cameras, mostly ridesharing vehicles.<\/p>\n

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 sheds appeared, disappeared or overstayed their welcome over time.<\/p>\n

The results are eye-opening: The researchers confirmed more than 5,000 active permitted sheds and an estimated 500 unpermitted or expired ones \u2014 nearly 10% of the total.<\/p>\n

Using this approach, the city could continuously monitor the lifecycle of every sidewalk shed, from installation to removal, without sending inspectors out block by block.<\/p>\n

It could finally\u00a0see\u00a0the scope of the problem, along with specific locations, in real time.<\/p>\n

This kind of urban-scale monitoring \u2014 where cities use technology to observe themselves \u2014 represents a profound shift in how we manage public life and assets like city streets.<\/p>\n

Rather than waiting for complaints, we can use data to prioritize inspections, enforce regulations and, most important, improve the daily experience of residents.<\/p>\n

Cornell Tech has already demonstrated how this approach can empower both government and residents. Our \u201cTreefolio\u201d project, a partnership with Cornell\u2019s Design Across Scales Lab, built an interactive \u201cdigital twin\u201d of the city\u2019s street tree canopy.<\/p>\n

The model combines the city\u2019s open data, LiDAR mapping models and other visualization tools to let any New Yorker explore and advocate for better tree coverage in their neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

The platform transforms raw data into a tool for civic empowerment.<\/p>\n

Imagine a similar tool for scaffolding: a public-facing \u201cShedfolio\u201d that lets anyone see how long a sidewalk shed has been up, whether it has a valid permit and when it is scheduled to come down.<\/p>\n

Residents could report discrepancies, journalists could track abuse and the DOB could focus its limited resources where needed most.<\/p>\n

Some might gripe that increased camera monitoring contributes to an ever-expanding surveillance state.<\/p>\n

Yet the images would capture views that are already out in the open, often already widely available.<\/p>\n

Plus, they can be handled with robust privacy safeguards.<\/p>\n

The end product would be a powerful management tool: Every roving taxi or rideshare could passively contribute to a living map of the city\u2019s infrastructure<\/a> \u2014 sidewalk sheds today, potholes and streetlights<\/a> tomorrow.<\/p>\n

To get there, the DOB should partner with academic researchers and leading computer-vision technology companies\u00a0to help better monitor and maintain public assets.<\/p>\n

We could turn cutting-edge research into a practical system for identifying expired or unpermitted scaffolds and other infrastructure, visualizing citywide patterns and accelerating safe takedowns.<\/p>\n

It would be a tangible step toward smarter, more accountable governance \u2014 something every New Yorker could literally see and feel on their daily walk.<\/p>\n

Michael Samuelian is the founding director of the Urban Technology Hub at Cornell Tech, where Matthew Franchi is a PhD candidate in computer science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Built to protect pedestrians from falling debris, the ubiquitous sidewalk shed has become an unfortunate defining feature of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":134152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[300,6005,252,2823,42362,5865,9,24,55,54,56,299,8302],"class_list":{"0":"post-134151","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-cameras","9":"tag-cornell-university","10":"tag-data","11":"tag-department-of-buildings","12":"tag-future-tech","13":"tag-infrastructure","14":"tag-new-york","15":"tag-new-york-city","16":"tag-new-york-city-headlines","17":"tag-new-york-city-news","18":"tag-ny","19":"tag-opinion","20":"tag-scaffolding"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}