Parking Permit Abusers Being Cleared from Chinatown?

A Chinatown tipster sent along these remarkable pictures yesterday of what seems to be an effort to cut down on placarded vehicles clogging the neighborhood’s streets:

There are white paper signs posted on lamp poles and parking meters that say "No Permit Area, Tow Away Zone." Lo and behold, there are hardly any cars with placards. The only way that this could have happened is for there to be an internal memo that was circulated as well. (Permit parkers would normally tear the sheets off and park anyway without a memo that they got already.) Please note that the pictures of Mott Street show a LOT of empty metered parking spaces at 11:30 am! That is amazing since those spaces are normally occupied by placard vehicles. This just goes to show that without placard cars in Chinatown there are many more parking spaces for the public and for business deliveries.

chinatown2.jpg

Of course, not every placarded parker was obeying the directive, as the second picture shows.

Anyone else see any signs like this in Chinatown or elsewhere?

Related:

  • This morning, I overheard a court officer tell another court employee that the signs are up “temporarily” for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday only. Let’s see what happens on Thursday and Friday. Will it be back to business as usual with placarded vehicles?

  • At Tuesday night’s CB2 meeting, DOT presented their “Lower Manhattan Transit Priority Plan”. During this presentation, as an aside, Margaret Forgione mentioned that part of this program includes limiting permit parking in certain parts of downtown.

    She brushed through that very quickly, saying that this was only going to affect CB1 (below Canal) and not CB2, and she only left the slide with areas of permits restriction demarcated on the screen for seconds, but just mentioning limitiations on permit parkers got applause from the crowd.

  • moocow

    The second picture on Mulberry, all those cars have two wheels on a very small sidewalk. These guys aren’t just taking parking spaces, by “legally” abandoning their cars.

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