Parking payola

Alaw of political physics says that what Mike Bloomberg denied civil servants for the greater city’s sake, Mayor de Blasio will give back. Unions howl. Bloomberg holds firm. De Blasio caves. We’ve seen this story before with raises or seniority rules — but in an only-in-New York twist, this time the currency is free parking.

The Department of Education is printing up 50,000 windshield placards that teachers, administrators, custodians and cafeteria workers will soon use to jockey for just 10,000 street-parking spots surrounding public school buildings, fulfilling a demand from a major de Blasio backer, the United Federation of Teachers.

If the numbers of placards and parking spaces sound mismatched, and the volume of cars too many for already clogged streets, that’s because they are — which explains why Bloomberg, a decade back, in efforts to reduce driving and traffic congestion, scaled back the number of permits to roughly match the number of spaces, with each school doling them out at their discretion.

De Blasio says decisions by labor arbitrators forced his hand — and true, he’s under orders to provide placards for every administrator, food server and custodian with a car.

But instead of fighting those orders to the bitter end of the legal system — as the mayor does to, say, protect his emails from prying eyes — de Blasio and chief labor negotiator Bob Linn accepted them, necessitating an end to the rationing of placards for teachers, too.

Thereby confirming free parking forever more as a union contract entitlement, and giving de Blasio his Oprah moment with the UFT a few months before reelection primary day:

You get a car (placard)! And you get a car (placard)! And you get a car (placard)!

To refocus these bad optics, de Blasio now couples the new permits with a welcome plan to crack down on placard-enabled lawlessness by city government workers and drivers pretending to be.

The new teachers’ permits, unlike the old ones, will specify one and only one valid location — with loss of privileges a penalty for misuse. The NYPD, awkwardly both the main enforcer and widespread abuser of private vehicle placards, commits to cracking down on its own ranks.

He’s also hiring a hundred new enforcers he says will pay for themselves, with technology coming soon to catch scofflaws with a quick scan.

That’s nice — but some discipline in labor relations would have been even better.