Thursday, May 12, 2016

NYPD handing out tickets for legal parking

From the Village Voice:

The NYPD has issued illegal parking summonses to thousands of New Yorkers over the past seven years, the department admitted on Friday, extracting as much as $12 million from drivers who had broken no laws, mostly in lower-income neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens.

The $165 tickets were handed out to drivers who parked in front of pedestrian ramps at “T” intersections, a practice that has been perfectly legal since a rule change in 2009 designed to improve pedestrian safety and open up more parking.

The illegal tickets were discovered by Ben Wellington, a statistics professor in the City & Regional Planning program at the Pratt Institute. Wellington analyzed ticketing data publicly available through NYC Open Data, a city-run portal that disseminates datasets collected by a raft of city agencies — the site pumps out spreadsheets detailing everything from restaurant inspection results to the city’s most popular baby names. In this case Wellington, who also runs the well-known data blog IQuantNewYork, started crunching numbers earlier this year and found that the department’s mistake was widespread.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Parking in front of pedesterian ramps blocks access to people in wheelchairs, people pushing shopping carts and people with baby strollers and should not be allowed. when you with your elderly parent in a wheelchair you appreciate those ramps and it is so frustrating when they are blocked by parked cars.

JQ LLC said...

all in areas where rampant imposed gentrification has been set. The NYPD is clearly doing the bidding for developers. The shit is plain evil. Blaz and Bratton has to go.

Anonymous said...

The City will fix this. NYC Open Data portal will be shut down soon.

Anonymous said...

Parking in front of pedesterian ramps blocks access to people in wheelchairs, people pushing shopping carts and people with baby strollers

Read the article - this is about ramps that open up into the street where there are no crosswalks. No one should be using them to cross into the street, as that'd be jaywalking, leastly so if they're physically compromised in any way like you describe.

Gary W said...

Saw this in the NY Post, and of course the guy complaining has his car registered out of state. Dick

And why would you be pushing your elderly parent in a wheel chair out in the middle of the street. "Cross at the Green not in Between"

Res Ipsa said...

Anonymous #1, that may be true but if the law was changed to allow parking at those spaces 7 years ago, why are people being ticketed for it?

Anonymous said...

>a rule change in 2009 designed to improve pedestrian safety and open up more parking.

The city changing a rule so that there's MORE parking? I can't believe that ever happened. It certainly won't happen under the current mayor - every time I have to drive into Manhattan, it feels like more parking spots have disappeared.

Anonymous said...

It all gets laundered and a big share winds up in De Blasio's re-election fund.