NYC’s parking placard farce
One can imagine the scornful laughs that erupted around the city when Mayor de Blasio, on live television, pledged to crack down on the abuse of parking placards by city employees. The issue came up when I asked de Blasio about the administration’s decision to hand out an estimated 50,000 parking placards to city teachers and paraprofessionals.
“We have a big focus with our enforcement agents in making sure that if there’s a placard, it’s being used appropriately, and there’s real penalties if it’s not used appropriately,” the mayor told me. “(NYPD) Commissioner (James) O’Neill has made very clear he won’t tolerate any of his employees using their placards inappropriately. And the same will go for the school system.”
The mayor said this with a straight face. But New Yorkers have learned the hard way that the city hands out placards willynilly, with enforcement at best a bad joke.
Every New Yorker, including de Blasio and O’Neill, knows that every day, on every shift, public employees use their placards as an excuse to park in blatantly hazardous and illegal ways at every police precinct, firehouse and courthouse in our city.
People double- and triple-park personal cars — some with valid placards, many without — and leave them on sidewalks, sprawled across bus lanes and crosswalks, or in front of hydrants. Bus stops get converted into parking lots; revenue from many parking meters drops to zero.
Parking on the sidewalk or in a no-standing zone usually has nothing to do with official business, but violators do it with impunity, even with placards that are expired or obviously forged. They know that cops and traffic agents rarely ticket or tow placard offenders; that expensive experience is reserved for the rest of us.
In many cases, you don’t even need a placard. One way to break the law with impunity is to leave a neon-green reflective vest on the dashboard that says “POLICE,” which anybody can buy online for about $35. Other violators get free parking by displaying a small plastic card that law enforcement unions print and distribute to donors for that very purpose.
These are not harmless violations. A decade ago, one transportation consultant calculated that the city loses $46 million a year just from the metered spaces hogged by the estimated extra 19,000 cars driven every day by placard-holding commuters who would otherwise take public transportation.
A 2008 study by the city’s Department of Transportation found that in the area near City Hall and the courts, “nearly one in eight permitted vehicles were illegally parked at a bus stop, crosswalk, fire hydrant, driveway or were doubleparked,” and “placards displayed by 9% of all agency and law enforcement permitted vehicles were deemed to be inauthentic or illegitimate in some way,” taking up 22% of the spaces needed for truck deliveries.
The problem continues to this day, and photos posted on Twitter by an anonymous advocate called @placardabuse strongly suggest that illegal parking leads to additional lawbreaking.
Some illegally parked cars with placards sport out-of-state license plates from places like Florida and Washington State, suggesting insurance fraud. And a fair number have reflective or opaque license plate covers, which are illegal in New York but available for $25 online; the covers make it impossible for speed cameras and tollbooth cameras to photograph a violator’s plates.
“Misplaced or covered-up license plates have allowed motorists to violate traffic laws and evade tickets in at least 144,852 cases over the past two years,” the Daily News reported last year.
And why not? Once people realize they can get away with a little “harmless” lawbreaking, there’s no reason to stop at a parking spot.
The current lax attitude puts us all in danger. Last year, Port Authority cops stopped a man for driving recklessly through the Holland Tunnel. He turned out to have a phony, official-looking placard claiming “this vehicle is on official business/ICE/HIS Task Force/U.S. Dept of Homeland Security.” He also had driver’s licenses from different states under two different names.
The phony placard user in the tunnel was a pot smoker who turned out to be high, harmless and arrested without fanfare. The next one might not be.
In this age of GPS, bar coding and embedded chips, it’s possible to create placards that are counterfeitproof and trackable. The mayor should fast-track creation of a new, abuse-resistant system — and replace today’s comedy of errors with real enforcement.