By Benyamin Davidsons
Two years ago, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to tackle the rampant parking placard abuse in New York City. City officials admit that they have made only little progress in preventing placard holders from switching it from car to car.
As reported by the NY Post, digital stickers, which were proposed as the fix in February 2019, have only reached a small percentage of New York City’s tens of thousands of placard holders. The Department of Transportation has issued merely 1,700 new decals — out of more than 125,000 placards in circulation.
Parking placards were intended to give municipal employees on the job access to quick, short term curbside parking. The privilege is widely abused, as evident by cars owned by government workers constantly parked on city sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes, bus lanes, in front of fire hydrants, and no-standing zones.
The annual survey of placard misuse, which Hizzoner had said would be conducted by his office’s Street Conditions Observation Unit, never actualized in 2020, the city admitted. A city official commented to blame the delays on COVID-19, and said the unit’s time was spent in an effort to allocate street dining for restaurants. Only a few placard permits were revoked in 2020 under Hizzoner’s “three strikes” policy, which says that lawbreakers would lose their placards after three violations. A dedicated enforcement unit launched in 2019 to patrol violation “hotspots” such as lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn was nixed in July amid the city’s budget woes.
As per The Post, the mayor had also vowed to shift the entire city over to a digital “pay-by-plate” parking system by the beginning of 2021. “We’re going to phase out placards as we know them entirely by 2021,” de Blasio had said then. The then proposed $52 million system, which would automatically register cars as legally or illegally parked, is also delayed, as per officials. The new time frame for the pay-by-plate system is sometime this year, said a city official, who blamed the delays on “the unprecedented, unexpected, and dual public health and budget crises we’re facing.” “The pay-by-plate system requires a total overhaul of the city’s 14,500 parking meters,” the official said. “That’s a massive undertaking at any time, and certainly even more so given the unprecedented challenges we’re continuing to face. We’re on track to get this project underway this coming year.”
