‘Sir, You Can’t Park There’

A black Nissan SUV sits in a 1-train staircase at West 157th Street and Broadway after crashing into it on November 24. Photo: Theodore Parisienne/NY Daily News via Getty Images

Of the thousands of vehicle collisions in New York in November, only one ended with an SUV the size of a studio apartment half-swallowed by a subway entrance. “You know, funnily enough,” says Marty Morua, a real-estate agent whose TikTok documenting the incident on 157th Street has over 2 million views, “he was driving so slow that I didn’t even hear the bang.”

After being escorted from the car, the driver, 25-year-old Miguel Delacruz-Martinez, sat idly in the back of an ambulance, smiling sleepily, unharmed. The NYPD Emergency Service Unit was called to dislodge the black Nissan Rogue, and a few pedestrians gathered around, some taking videos or pictures, others watching in a trance as the SUV emerged with barely a scratch. Delacruz-Martinez was later charged with driving while intoxicated and reckless endangerment.

The viral video of the accident, narrated by Morua over the dulcet tones of a “Lil Nas X–style horn trap beat,” inspired dozens of commenters to make the same joke (variations on “Sir, you can’t park there”) as well as more original quips (“Damn GPS be having you go through tunnels”). In general, though, “nobody was shocked,” says Morua.

Perhaps that’s because traffic mishaps and near misses now seem more common, and while no one was injured in this particular Manhattan-meets-GTA incident, traffic violence across New York has seen a startling jump in the past year. Lower rates of traffic-related injuries and casualties were briefly one of Mayor Adams’s (few) claims to fame, but as of mid-November, 226 people have been killed and more than 2,247 seriously injured in traffic violence this year — a 26 percent increase since 2018. The death count hit the 100-person mark on June 7, the earliest that milestone has been reached since 2014.

But there could be a more mundane reason the incident didn’t draw more immediate attention from pedestrians. “Come on,” says Morua. “It’s New York.”