7 ms·

NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes

103 points by awb 4y ago

mancerayder 4y 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?
scarface74 4y ago
I would love if cities did the same with AirBnbs that break the local zoning ordinances.
oaththrowaway 4y ago
Sean Avery is about to be rich. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owt7mR0Kdb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owt7mR0Kdb8
wahnfrieden 4y ago
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Yup: https://twitter.com/copsinbikelanes https://twitter.com/copsinbikelanes
Temporary_31337 4y ago
- reidjs 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 4dahalibut 4y ago
  - walthamstow 4y ago
- settrans 4y ago
  People tend not to react to parking violations by taking the law in their own hands with capricious, violent aggression because in general, Americans tend to be civil and respect the rule of law. Less so in NYC, but still broadly true.
  - praestigiare 4y ago
    You mean "moreso in NYC", right, as NYC is 59th out of the largest 100 cities when ranked by descending violent crime rate.
  - bhupy 4y ago
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      The problem is that "the idiots" will also resort to violence. It is not like cars being parked in shitty ways is a big enough problem for me to want the escalation on that matter on a societal level.
paddy_m 4y 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 https://twitter.com/placardabuse
- InitialLastName 4y 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-brooklyn-mans-illegal-parking-complaints-to-311-and-the-nypd/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/death-threats-follow-...
  - woah 4y 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
    - massysett 4y ago
      There's precedent for this, or rather for people figuring out a way around it. A NYC law that paid rewards to those to report idling vehicles. A few people make non-trivial sums doing this. They act like tourists or like they're lost in a phone conversation so they can hang out around the vehicle and record the violation. They have to record the truck idling for a few minutes to collect the money, so without a disguise they risk being beat up. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/nyregion/clean-air-idle-car.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/nyregion/clean-air-idle-c...
jackconsidine 4y 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 4y ago
  Seinfeld scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wH9bXy--lA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wH9bXy--lA
  - jackconsidine 4y ago
    Thank you!
- pxmpxm 4y 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.
  - jackconsidine 4y ago
    Are you suggesting that because cyclists are annoying, parking ordinances and laws should be ignored?
    - pxmpxm 4y ago
      - ch4s3 4y ago
        This is a pretty dismissive take. The city could easily designate unloading zones in lieu of a parking space or town in the middle of most blocks. Don’t forget, bike lanes are also used for deliveries.
busterarm 4y 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).
- addicted 4y 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.
- j0hnyl 4y 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.
  - busterarm 4y 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.
kingkawn 4y ago
Shield and sword of the bike lane
jondeval 4y 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.
- awb 4y ago
  What’s the difference between snitching and reporting a crime? The severity of the crime and your relationship to the offender?
- andrew991116 4y 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.
- yardie 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Councils [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)
- bombcar 4y ago
- scarface74 4y 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-regulations-texas.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/abortion-law-regulatio...
swozniak 4y ago
In my experience it's always a cop car though.
Justsignedup 4y ago
The #1 point here: NYC income from tickets is down. Yeah. Don't solve the problem, just cause more pain.
bombcar 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.
mancerayder 4y 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 4y 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.

103 points by awb 4y 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?

scarface74 4y ago

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

oaththrowaway 4y ago

Sean Avery is about to be rich. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owt7mR0Kdb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owt7mR0Kdb8

wahnfrieden 4y ago

ceejayoz 4y ago
Yup: https://twitter.com/copsinbikelanes https://twitter.com/copsinbikelanes

Temporary_31337 4y ago

reidjs 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
4dahalibut 4y ago
- walthamstow 4y ago
settrans 4y ago
People tend not to react to parking violations by taking the law in their own hands with capricious, violent aggression because in general, Americans tend to be civil and respect the rule of law. Less so in NYC, but still broadly true.
- praestigiare 4y ago
  You mean "moreso in NYC", right, as NYC is 59th out of the largest 100 cities when ranked by descending violent crime rate.
- bhupy 4y ago
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    The problem is that "the idiots" will also resort to violence. It is not like cars being parked in shitty ways is a big enough problem for me to want the escalation on that matter on a societal level.

paddy_m 4y 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 https://twitter.com/placardabuse

InitialLastName 4y 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-brooklyn-mans-illegal-parking-complaints-to-311-and-the-nypd/ https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/death-threats-follow-...
- woah 4y 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
  - massysett 4y ago
    There's precedent for this, or rather for people figuring out a way around it. A NYC law that paid rewards to those to report idling vehicles. A few people make non-trivial sums doing this. They act like tourists or like they're lost in a phone conversation so they can hang out around the vehicle and record the violation. They have to record the truck idling for a few minutes to collect the money, so without a disguise they risk being beat up. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/nyregion/clean-air-idle-car.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/nyregion/clean-air-idle-c...

jackconsidine 4y 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 4y ago
Seinfeld scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wH9bXy--lA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wH9bXy--lA
- jackconsidine 4y ago
  Thank you!
pxmpxm 4y 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.
- jackconsidine 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that because cyclists are annoying, parking ordinances and laws should be ignored?
  - pxmpxm 4y ago
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      This is a pretty dismissive take. The city could easily designate unloading zones in lieu of a parking space or town in the middle of most blocks. Don’t forget, bike lanes are also used for deliveries.

busterarm 4y 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).

addicted 4y 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.
j0hnyl 4y 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.
- busterarm 4y 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.

kingkawn 4y ago

Shield and sword of the bike lane

jondeval 4y 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.

awb 4y ago
What’s the difference between snitching and reporting a crime? The severity of the crime and your relationship to the offender?
andrew991116 4y 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.
yardie 4y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens%27_Councils [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)
bombcar 4y ago
scarface74 4y 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-regulations-texas.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/abortion-law-regulatio...

swozniak 4y ago

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

Justsignedup 4y ago

The #1 point here: NYC income from tickets is down. Yeah. Don't solve the problem, just cause more pain.

bombcar 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.

mancerayder 4y 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 4y 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.