This is Street Wars, a weekly series on the battle for space on New York’s streets and sidewalks.

Any New Yorker who regularly walks around the city quickly learns which sidewalks are a pleasure to navigate and which are more like obstacle courses. Some are wide enough to stroll two, maybe three people across. Some are so narrow and crowded that it’s easier to just walk in the street, despite the danger.

Matthew Franchi, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Cornell University, wanted to see if it was possible to use data to determine which sidewalks were, in fact, the most and least “claustrophobic” across the city.

Claustrophobic sidewalks, by Franchi’s definition, are those that have many pedestrians and city structures such as bus stop shelters (2,030 in Queens, for example), trash cans (more than 9,600 in Manhattan), bicycle racks (more than 12,000 in Brooklyn), trees (more than 151,000 in Staten Island) and fire hydrants (more than 15,000 in the Bronx). He was able to track those factors using data from the city and images from dash cameras used widely by ride-share drivers.

Perhaps to no one’s surprise, Franchi found that the Times Square area of Midtown was the neighborhood with the most claustrophobic sidewalks; it was more than seven times more claustrophobic than the city average. Greenwich Village, Gramercy, Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope also made the list of the top 25 most claustrophobic neighborhoods for pedestrians. Jamaica Bay, Great Kills-Eltingville in Staten Island and Fort Hamilton were among the 25 least claustrophobic neighborhoods, according to his research.