Have fun moving your car & dealing with bums

From WPIX:

We’ve had to deal with the polar vortex, and snowstorm after snowstorm, but since February 1st New Yorkers haven’t had to worry about moving their cars. That’s about to change with alternate side parking rules back in effect.

The suspension ends officially starting Monday, February 23rd. The Department of Transportation needs to clean the snow, ice and remaining debris.

In Queens, we found many drivers with a lot of digging out ahead of them on Sunday night. Alternate side parking rules have been suspended in the city since February 1st, but that ends on Monday. It was a 22-day stretch.

Because of the ice, brooms haven’t been able to sweep the alternate-side routes.


From WPIX:

The MTA and the NYPD have to backed off a plan to “remove” the homeless who have been using the subways as shelter from the cold.

An MTA spokesman announced Sunday night the plan is on hold to prevent it “from being portrayed wrongly.”

The removal was supposed to start Monday at 3 a.m. on the “E” line.

But, due to a report from DNAinfo, the agency was forced to tone down its language, insisting the so-called “outreach program” was to be voluntary.

A transit official said, “We are not doing this to be cruel.”

Hunters Point to get street sweeping

From DNA Info:

A proposal to bring street sweepers to Long Island City has some residents panicked over alternate side parking, which they say would make finding a spot a nightmare in a neighborhood where it's already difficult to park.

Last year, hundreds of residents in Hunters Point signed an online petition calling for Department of Sanitation street sweepers in the waterfront neighborhood. The group says their streets are filthy, and that the current lack of parking rules allows non-residents to leave their cars in the same spots for weeks at a time.

But other residents say they'd rather put up with a little trash than deal with the harrowing prospect of alternate side parking, and having to shuffle their cars back and forth every day.

A street cleaning plan is being explored by Queens Community Board 2 and City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, who asked the Department of Sanitation to come up with a strategy for the neighborhood after getting numerous complaints about dirty streets.

Representatives from the Department of Sanitation detailed a proposal that would bring street cleaning to a swath of Hunters Point west of Jackson Avenue, between 45th and Borden avenues.

The sweepers would come twice a week, cleaning the south and east sides of the streets on Wednesdays and the north and west sides on Thursdays. Streets in the area south of 47th Road would be cleaned from 9 to 10:30 a.m. while streets to the north would be cleaned between 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.

Metered blocks would be cleaned in half-hour segments between 7:30 and 9 a.m.
Some residents supported the plan as a way to stop out-of-towners from using Hunters Point as a parking garage, leaving their cars parked for long stretches of time.