End NYC’s free parking scam

It’s not news to anyone who reads these pages, but it is scandalous nonetheless: Despite wave after wave of supposed reforms, the abuse of parking placards — those watch-me-put-my-car-anywhere laminated signs thrown on the dashboard by everyone from police to teachers to judges to elected officials — is rampant, and enforcement is nearly nonexistent.

So says the city’s Department of Investigation under Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber in a thorough new report carried out as part of Local Law 6, reforms passed in 2020. DOI has found that the issuing of nearly 100,000 free parking passes is a mess, and bad actors face no consequences. To wit:

• “The three permitting agencies” — the Transportation, Education and Police Departments — “have inconsistent eligibility criteria and issue permits that look different, making identification of fraudulent permits unnecessarily difficult.”

• Though more than 100 city employees could’ve gotten their permits revoked under a “three strikes” rule implemented in 2019 (the city press release read “Mayor Puts City on Path to Replacing Broken Placard System”), “as of September 9, 2022, NYPD and DOE, which are authorized to revoke parking permits under the three strikes rule, have not done so.” And people wonder why the public is cynical about government integrity, accountability and competence.

• Rather than being handled by traffic enforcement agents, it’s uniformed officers who handle illegal parking or permit misuse complaints, as a serious misuse of resources that all but guarantees preferential treatment.

• The NYPD has “no written policies or procedures” regarding areas around police facilities designed by the department as parking for employees. That feeds a culture of impunity whereby police drive into work and give themselves permission to block sidewalks and bike lanes.

• When citizens call 311 to try to get action on illegal parking, hardly anything ever happens. DOI found that “91% of the 311 complaints for parking permit misuse did not result in a summons,” and “82% of illegal parking complaints did not result in a summons.” Adding insult to injury, nearly a quarter of the service requests for both illegal parking and permit misuse were closed in 20 minutes or less — a pretty obvious sign that nobody gave a hoot.

It’s not rhetoric that makes the report scathing; it’s detail after detail after detail.

This is not a complicated problem to fix. As DOI recommends, the permitting agencies must develop a single uniform placard, ideally a sticker with a bar code, that’s really hard to counterfeit — and then comb their records to revoke placards that are no longer valid, as well as those of chronic violators.

The NYPD should nix its “self-enforcement zones” around precinct houses, laying out clear policies and having traffic enforcement agents, not cops, ensure people abide by the rules.

Before too long, physical permits should give way to digital ones linked to specific vehicles and meters and easily checked by enforcement personnel.

What DOI doesn’t do is call for an annual census, detailing how many placards each agency receives. Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler created a public spreadsheet in 2008 during the Bloomberg years. Such an accounting should be produced. And everyone who gets a placard should have the IRS notified that they are receiving a tangible — and taxable — benefit for the value of the free parking.

It’s 2024; advanced technology makes all of this easy as pie. What we lack, as usual, is political will.