NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-29/nyc-may-pay-people-for-reporting-bike-lane-blockers

by awb • 4 years ago

103 50 4 years ago

bloomberg.com

scarface742• 4 years ago

I would love if cities did the same with AirBnbs that break the local zoning ordinances.

oaththrowaway• 4 years ago

Sean Avery is about to be rich.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owt7mR0Kdb8

paddy_m• 4 years ago

Reducing the issuance of placards won't solve anything if parking isn't enforced. The governing class (NYPD, FDNY, city government workers) in NYC starts their day by driving in and parking wherever they please knowing full well that they won't be held to the same laws that citizens are supposed to be. Many workers even deface or remove license plates so they can't be ticketed by automated cameras.

I would love citizen cell apps to enable enforcement, but I'm not hopeful. I would think that more cops would remove license plates and harass those trying to hold them to account. I truly don't know how it is possible to make NYPD accountable, maybe a federal intervention.

https://twitter.com/placardabuse

InitialLastName• 4 years ago

Not just that, but people who make a habit of reporting illegally parked cars frequently find themselves being harassed and threatened by anonymous people who have their phone number [0].

[0] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/death-threats-follow-...

woah• 4 years ago

Sounds like they are gearing up to go even further than phone calls:

In a statement, an NYPD spokesperson expressed concerns that the proposed law could lead to violent conflicts between drivers and civilians reporting illegally parked cars

jackconsidine3• 4 years ago

This is a huge issue- it's rare that I find a stretch of two blocks in Manhattan or Brooklyn that doesn't have a car sitting in the bike lane. Double parking seems to be a way of life (remember the Seinfeld episode?). About half the time there's someone in the car which might make this complicated, but I love that someone is raising this.

__s• 4 years ago

Seinfeld scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wH9bXy--lA

jackconsidine3• 4 years ago

Thank you!

pxmpxm2• 4 years ago

Highly dense neighborhoods will invariably have cars, and especially delivery vehicles, double parking all over because density always implies shortage of space; bike lanes are in now way special in this context, unless you're suburban transplant with a newfound IMACYCLISTNOW identity.

jackconsidine3• 4 years ago

Are you suggesting that because cyclists are annoying, parking ordinances and laws should be ignored?

Wowfunhappy2• 4 years ago

bike lanes are in now way special in this context

If there will always be a shortage of space, we should encourage the activity that uses that space more efficiently. That means bikes over cars.

busterarm5• 4 years ago

I lived around the corner from Midtown North police precinct and the Midtown Community Court next to it. My whole block was no parking. There is no streetsweeping on the block. It's set up that way so that NYPD and court officials have somewhere to park their personal vehicles. This even though they have a whole gated garage that takes up 1/3 of the block.

Instead, for the last (at least) 40 years, the parking scheme has been a way for NYPD officers to get paid. They'd sell their placards to tenants in the buildings on my street, effectively providing guaranteed on-street parking to the wealthy residents of my street.

Something like 3-4 companies own all of the parking garages in NYC. New York should spend its time removing the grift from parking and parking enforcement. It should also adjust the zoning so that landlords don't cheat the system (all Sunnyside Queens buildings are under 8 floors so that they don't have to build in parking spaces, etc).

j0hnyl2• 4 years ago

100% - it does feel like a massive grift. Also, there are so many useless blocks in this city, especially outside of manhattan where there might be a dense population that has cars, but they're limited to parallel parking, when in fact there's plenty of room to have angled parking if you allow the cars to park halfway on the sidewalk. This is how it's done in many European cities, and even with their sidewalks that are actually 2x narrower than ours, there's plenty of room for cars and for pedestrians. NYC should zone a bunch of these useless extra wide sidewalks that no one needs for angled parking and just solve the problem over night.

busterarm5• 4 years ago

European cities typically don't have the same level of crime as NYC's outer boroughs...historically. Angled parking presents a problem when people want to lie in wait to rob you. It's also difficult for street-level cameras to track people.

Guaranteed NYC will never do this.

aabajian• 4 years ago

I 100% agree. I see those placards on the most expensive vehicles (Lamborghini SUV, Porsche 911s, etc). Either the NYC police are very well paid, or they are selling their placards.

Nextgrid• 4 years ago

Out of curiosity, why don't landlords want parking spaces? Does it cost more than what it adds to the property value?

kube-system• 4 years ago

Parking spaces rent for less than apartments do

dantheman• 4 years ago

We should end free overnight parking, and make street parking only for a few hours. If you want to have a car put it in a garage or live in a building that has parking.

e40• 4 years ago

And for the units which don't have parking, what are you going to do, remove them from the market? Honestly, this is the wrong direction. How about we remove the corruption??

xxpor• 4 years ago

Instead, for the last (at least) 40 years, the parking scheme has been a way for NYPD officers to get paid. They'd sell their placards to tenants in the buildings on my street, effectively providing guaranteed on-street parking to the wealthy residents of my street.

Calling this a grift is doing a disservice, IMO. This is straight up corruption. And it's rampant.

addicted• 4 years ago

Manhattan should end street parking, paid or free. Cars are not compatible with a city of its nature and parking is probably the least effective use of that space.

kingkawn• 4 years ago

Shield and sword of the bike lane

jondeval• 4 years ago

I find this proposal problematic. There is a world of difference between reporting on a violation in your community because you're a concerned citizen, and directly incentivizing citizens to report on each other.

I'm sure you can find some small counter examples, but by and large the US has never had a history of augmenting law enforcement by way of private citizens. We are not a country of snitches.

yardie• 4 years ago

I'm sure you can find some small counter examples, but by and large the US has never had a history of augmenting law enforcement by way of private citizens. We are not a country of snitches.

Well not a small counter example, but a very large organization with origins in the KKK. [0]

In fact, snitching on fellow Americans has become so common we created an internet meme when, specifically, white women of a certain social class do it. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Councils

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)

scarface742• 4 years ago

If you ignore the law that was passed in Texas before Roe vs Wade was overturned giving private citizens the right to sue abortion providers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/abortion-law-regulatio...

massysett2• 4 years ago

Actually there is a long history of this in the USA, so much so that there is a term of art for it and a Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_attorney_general

awb• 4 years ago

What’s the difference between snitching and reporting a crime? The severity of the crime and your relationship to the offender?

andrew991116• 4 years ago

A similar thing was attempted in Taiwan, and some people ended up quitting their jobs & just drove around with a dash cam all day to report people. It eventually ended because fines & reports skyrocketed & people became furious.

swozniak• 4 years ago

In my experience it's always a cop car though.

Justsignedup• 4 years ago

The #1 point here: NYC income from tickets is down.

Yeah. Don't solve the problem, just cause more pain.

bombcar• 4 years ago

Just make it completely legal to crush an illegally parked car. Problem solved. Roving bands of steamrollers and tanks will appear overnight. You can charge admission!

eat_veggies• 4 years ago

It is no use distinguishing between cops and citizens. Under Empire, the difference between the police and the population is abolished. At any moment each citizen of Empire can, through a characteristically Bloomesque reversal, reveal himself a cop.

Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War

theptip• 4 years ago

This seems odd. If the situation is so bad, surely you can cover a salary for a traffic inspector to do the rounds? Even at one ticket per hour you should be able to pay the salaries of the inspectors needed to make a dent in the problem.

Why do we need to vigilantize the populace? Just enforce the laws!

CodeWriter23• 4 years ago

It's only odd if you don't consider the unstated goal which is to incrementally increase the number of things reportable for bounties until the result is a wage-free crowdsourced and privatized (side-stepping The Constitution) Secret Police Force.

mdasen• 4 years ago

It is odd and I think it speaks to a culture problem in the NYPD and many urban police departments. They're often part of the "car culture" of cities. They want to drive and park easily. Their friends want to drive and park easily. That makes them want to turn a blind eye toward these types of infractions.

Every police officer and every department is going to decide that there are some crimes and infractions that they care about, assign people to enforce, and promote people for working on. Pedestrian and bike safety often isn't one of them - especially when the majority of the officers don't see that as a problem to begin with and see enforcement against cars as a bad thing for them and their family/friends.

In any organization, the top only has so much power. If you work in software, the CEO might say "we want to do X," but if engineering managers and individual engineers aren't enthusiastic about X, it's going to be a struggle. Sure, they'll maybe create some team and assign engineers they don't consider that great to the team (since they don't care to see X done). Those engineers might be told things like "you should really spend 20-50% of your time doing things that will impact the whole org rather than focusing on X" or maybe those engineers see that their managers aren't really interested in X and try to transfer off the team or find ways of doing something else while still on the team that their managers do care about.

Yes, the CEO can fire people, but it's also easy to make it seem like progress is happening without progress really happening. Ok, the mayor or city council wants to see progress on ticketing these evil cars. Well, the police often have the option of going into low-income or minority neighborhoods and ticketing there, probably for infractions that aren't actually what the mayor or council see as the problem. But they still report that ticketing bad cars is up 20% and give just enough detail and just enough obfuscation that the mayor/council doesn't really know what's going on.

Maybe the city wants to create a new organization outside the NYPD to take on this task. Well, now you're fighting the NYPD (and likely the unions) which probably has more power than you do.

I agree: just enforce the laws. However, that's easier said than done when the people tasked with enforcing the laws might be a big part of the problem.

tingletech• 4 years ago

I sort of wish they would do this in Oakland for people riding those stupid electric scooters or bikes at full speed down the sidewalk. Sometimes it feels safer to walk in the street than the sidewalk.

mancerayder2• 4 years ago

If they start enforcing blocked bike lanes, at some point can they start enforcing bikes, especially ebikes, on the sidewalks? It's incredibly annoying hazard for pedestrians.

stjohnswarts• 4 years ago

I wish my little community did this, Texans are particularly belligerent against bike lanes and bicyclists rights. As long as the program works I don't know why laws like this can't have a 1 year sunset clause. That way if it gets abused then it will auto expire. 1 years would be a nice amount of time to make sure it doesn't get abused by trolls.

mancerayder2• 4 years ago

This seems to be part of a general Zeitgeist of removing state enforcement of laws and leaving it to the citizens to police each other.

In the pharmacy now there's plastic casing protecting almost everything - even toothpaste requires a bell and an assistant. Then there are now private security guards that didn't exist before. You can smoke or drink on the subway now and no one will stop you. You can certainly jump the turnstile and no one will stop you (not for a few years). You can rob someone with a threat of violence and you won't end up in jail, not at all.

Again, citizens are expected to police each other. Or, if you're a victim of something it's your fault (and the on that committed the crime needs to be considered in light of inequality, or some other external circumstance).

A bit of a tangent: "De-policing" doesn't actually de police, it just privatizes it, and feed inequality, because the rich will always afford private security (as they always had and will use more of).

Back from the tangent: this is more of the same - normally the state goes around issuing parking tickets and even enforcing traffic laws. Normally. However no one seems to be doing either lately. Especially moving vehicles. Should the citizens be policing each other too?

The suggestion in this thread to "smash car windows in" is part of that Zeitgeist I'm talking about.

Anyone else looking to move to a rural area?

NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes

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