Quoted post unavailable.
Quoted post unavailable.
No post body was provided.
NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-...
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/19/nyregion/clean-air-idle-c...
Re: NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Quoted post unavailable.
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.
Re: NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
#54I 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…
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 a…
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.
Re: NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
#55Quoted post unavailable.
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.
Re: NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
#56This 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 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.
Re: NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, why don't landlords want parking spaces? Does it cost more than what it adds to the property value?
Parking spaces rent for less than apartments do
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.
Re: NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 origi…
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.
Re: NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
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.
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.
Re: NYC Proposal Offers Cash for Spotting Parking Violations in Bike Lanes
#60If 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.