Dave Caprio has spent years fitting trucks with side guards out of his Canarsie-based business, and he has reached a simple conclusion: every truck on New York City streets should have them. The metal panels are designed to keep pedestrians and cyclists from being dragged underneath a truck's frame and run over by its rear wheels, but Caprio says the city's current rules still leave tens or hundreds of thousands of trucks operating without them.
Caprio's push, detailed in a report from Streetsblog New York City, centers on the gap between which trucks are covered by New York City's side guard mandate and which are not. As it stands, the city only requires side guards on its own fleet, on trade-waste trucks regulated by the Business Integrity Commission, and on vehicles operated by companies holding large city contracts. Everything else on the road is exempt, even though Caprio's company, Virgo Fleet Supplies, sells Department of Transportation-approved side guard kits for around $2,400 — a cost he argues is modest next to the lives at stake.
The Business Integrity Commission, according to the Streetsblog report, grants waivers to roughly 50 percent of the 7,100 waste trucks it regulates. Caprio customizes guards to work around toolboxes, ladders, tanks, and other equipment that often trigger those exemptions, and he has pointed to one specific case that frustrates him: the Business Integrity Commission exempted the Badger truck involved in the 14th Street crash because toolboxes and fuel tanks made standard guards impractical. Caprio told the outlet that the open spaces on that exempted truck should still have been covered.
A European Model and a Transatlantic Comparison
Caprio says he came to recognize the lifesaving potential of side guards after researching the devices and visiting Italy, where, like the rest of the European Union, side guards have been mandated since 1989. London offers a particularly stark comparison for Caprio's argument. The city requires side guards on all trucks traveling in and out of it, along with strict cab-visibility standards for heavy goods vehicles, and according to a city press release cited by Streetsblog, side guards can reduce fatalities by 40 percent.
The numbers from 2025 illustrate the gap. London recorded 96 road deaths that year, including six cyclists, despite logging 1.5 million daily cycling trips. New York City, by contrast, recorded 205 street deaths in 2025, including 20 cyclists. Jeremy Edwards has said the city will take all necessary steps to prevent tragedies and promote street safety, per the Streetsblog report.
How New York City's Rules Took Shape
New York City's side guard mandate traces back to 2015, when the City Council required the devices on its own fleet and on Business Integrity Commission-regulated vehicles. That mandate came three years after Mathieu Lefevre was killed by a guard-less truck in Brooklyn in 2012, a death that helped push the issue onto the council's agenda. The Business Integrity Commission itself dates to 2001, when it was created to regulate the commercial trash-hauling industry.
The mandate expanded again in 2021, after Mario Valenzuela was killed by a truck without side guards on Borden Avenue in Queens in 2019. That year's rule change extended the requirement to trucking companies involved in city projects worth $2 million or more. The Department of Citywide Administrative Services estimated the 2021 rule covered about 1,000 contracts and 5,600 trucks.
Today, New York City's municipal fleet numbers 28,567 vehicles, and the rules apply to large vehicles, defined as those with a manufacturer gross vehicle weight rating exceeding 10,000 pounds. The city exempts street sweepers, fire engines, and off-road construction vehicles from fleet-wide side guard retrofits, and the Business Integrity Commission requires guards only when more than 13.8 inches separates a truck's bottom from the ground — a threshold that creates openings for vehicles like the exempted Badger truck.
A Debate Playing Out Beyond New York
New York's local rules sit inside a much larger national argument over whether side guards should be required on every commercial truck, not just municipal fleets and city contractors. New York State Senator Andrew Gounardes has introduced legislation, S3391, that would mandate side underride guards on all commercial trucks weighing 26,000 pounds or more operating on local streets in New York City and other large New York cities, according to the New York State Senate.
At the federal level, lawmakers introduced the Stop Underrides Act 2.0 in February 2026 to require the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to finalize mandatory side underride guard regulations for all new semi-trailers and single-unit trucks nationwide, as reported by Truck News. Current federal standards under FMVSS 223 and 224 only mandate rear impact guards, leaving the side-guard question largely to states and cities to sort out on their own.
Research from the USDOT Volpe National Transportation Systems Center found that bicyclist fatalities dropped by 61 percent and pedestrian fatalities dropped by 20 percent in side-impact truck collisions after the United Kingdom mandated national truck side guards in the 1980s, according to the USDOT Volpe Center. Not everyone in the trucking industry agrees expanding the mandate is the right call, however. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association opposes mandatory side underride guard legislation, citing high retrofit costs, added vehicle weight, and potential operational hazards on steep driveways and high curbs, per Land Line Media.
The push for broader side guard rules has deep roots in New York street safety activism. In June 2019, 20-year-old bicycle messenger Robyn Hightman was killed on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan after falling into the path of a commercial truck lacking side guards, a death that sparked intense local activism and renewed demands for comprehensive regulations, according to ProPublica. Her memorial ghost bike became a flashpoint of its own earlier this year, when a Midtown cleanup crew removed it, drawing fresh attention to the unresolved push for federal and municipal side guard mandates.
