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.
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.
Cyclists can't be too aggressive to drivers. Many drivers already seem to have a deep hatred for cyclists as a group, and frankly it's all to easy for a driver to injure or even kill a cyclist through negligence. Open hostility towards drivers in the short term would quickly become catastrophic in the long term.
Ye some cyclist seems to have a "I don't care if you hurt me"-mentality when manouvering. It can be quite nervewrecking since indeed I don't and the ones they try to punnish likely can't care less if they would happen to do.
This is generally overstated in both directions. Every time there's an actual analysis of the american publics opinion on cycling, the majority is neutral.
Which is not to say smashing windows is a good move. Though I would also contest that drivers breaking the law to endanger cyclists also don't make up the 'general public'. If they were not a small minority I would never ride my bike outside.
I would support this. Pedestrians should be able to wack cyclists on the sidewalk, and stab e-bikers, however. Certainly violence is the answer to enforcement issues, and not police.
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.
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].
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Vast majority of space, especially around the Manhattan and the dense part of Brooklyn and Bronx already is commercial unloading only Mon-Fri, yet the dynamic I mentioned is common place. Again high density implies shortage of space - you want groceries and bike/car lanes, but only get to pick one of the two.
It is possible to get groceries without a car in New York.
You are really ignoring the huge opportunity cost of land that is widespread personal car use in NYC - people just tend to ignore how much land that really is because they are so used to it*. Delivery trucks wouldn't be a problem if there were a lot less cars, but cars are sarcosanct in America.
[*] The story of the original Sim City comes to mind. They originally were going to show parking lots, etc, but realized all this infrastructure actually made it look stupid and empty.
Well of course it is, either a delivery truck unloads it to your local bodega, or an an amazon car unloads it to your doorstep. Again during the workweek, vast majority of street parking is only open to those two options, yet double parking is common place.
I think a majority of the roads in Manhattan should be closed to cars, and those which remain should be open only to commercial vehicles and individuals who can park in a handicapped parking spot.
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).
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.
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.
I'm certain they will never do it, but one can dream. I mean, they already do it for police precincts. I have not considered the crime element that you're describing either, but this doesn't need to be a citywide initiative, they can take it block per block.
It's extremely easy to hide, invisibly, between cars with angled parking. Angled parking also shortens the gap between your front and back tires perpendicular to the street. Less light passing through means less opportunity to see shadows that shouldn't be there.
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.
That's not exactly it. Per sqft parking spaces would typically bring in more. The problem is that parking space pricing is more competitive, doesn't allow you to increase rents for capital improvements and doesn't give you the flexibility to cheat the tax code like housing does.
You may have seen on TV recently talk about Trump inflating the size and value of his real estate holdings in NYC but that's _EVERY_ NYC landlord. There's massive tax advantages (write down opportunities) for them to do so.
And NYC gets to pretend that they have more tax money coming in than they really do to justify those billion dollar budgets that they always have a shortfall for.
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.
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??
>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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
77 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Owt7mR0Kdb8
Which is not to say smashing windows is a good move. Though I would also contest that drivers breaking the law to endanger cyclists also don't make up the 'general public'. If they were not a small minority I would never ride my bike outside.
Would rather the law be on my side
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
[0] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/02/09/death-threats-follow-...
> 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
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/nyregion/clean-air-idle-c...
You are really ignoring the huge opportunity cost of land that is widespread personal car use in NYC - people just tend to ignore how much land that really is because they are so used to it*. Delivery trucks wouldn't be a problem if there were a lot less cars, but cars are sarcosanct in America.
[*] The story of the original Sim City comes to mind. They originally were going to show parking lots, etc, but realized all this infrastructure actually made it look stupid and empty.
I’m aware. That’s why people are advocating enforcing the law.
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.
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).
Guaranteed NYC will never do this.
In reality, crime in New York City is at record lows: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm
> It's also difficult for street-level cameras to track people.
And that's another good thing.
You may have seen on TV recently talk about Trump inflating the size and value of his real estate holdings in NYC but that's _EVERY_ NYC landlord. There's massive tax advantages (write down opportunities) for them to do so.
And NYC gets to pretend that they have more tax money coming in than they really do to justify those billion dollar budgets that they always have a shortfall for.
Calling this a grift is doing a disservice, IMO. This is straight up corruption. And it's rampant.
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)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/us/abortion-law-regulatio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_attorney_general
Yeah. Don't solve the problem, just cause more pain.
Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War
Why do we need to vigilantize the populace? Just enforce the laws!
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.
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?