Let us clear the hydrants for you!
One day after the death of a Brooklyn man in a fire was partly blamed on illegally parked cars blocking life-saving fire hydrants, activists and advocates again called on the City Council to pass legislation that would allow everyday New Yorkers to fight the scourge of car owners who put the public at risk with their illegal and dangerous parking.
City fire Commissioner Robert Tucker took to social media to blast the hydrant-blocking cars on Sunday, but advocates have been sounding the alarm about the normalization of this illegal parking, which carries a $115 fine for the few who get caught.
"The city has let illegal behavior by drivers slide so far that hydrant parking is essentially normal, like sidewalk parking, crosswalk parking, bus lane parking and so on," said Jon Orcutt, the director of advocacy at Bike New York. "We’ll never achieve safe, sustainable streets in New York while this remains the case."
Tucker said he was "begging New Yorkers" to "not leave your cars on hydrants, but the city can do more than just beg, advocates say.
Council Member Lincoln Restler (D-Brooklyn) has for the past two years been trying to solve the problem of enforcement by giving New Yorkers the power to allow residents to write up drivers for parking violations like blocked bus lanes, bike lanes, and fire hydrants — then get a small bounty for their trouble.
The bill was originally introduced in 2023 and had a majority of Council support — but after a hearing, the original bill was modified to remove the citizen bounty. In 2024, Restler re-introduced the bill, now known as Intro 80, and restored the bounty. But the new bill has not been brought to a hearing and has the support of just 17 Council members and the Brooklyn Borough President.
“It’s infuriating because you see this kind of stuff all the time on New York City streets,” said Eric McClure, the executive director of StreetsPAC, the only political action committee that focuses on street safety. “We need some combination of more pervasive enforcement and higher fines for committing that offense. For repeat offenders, you could have a graduated fine scale for people who commit multiple violations of that nature, and then the ultimate fix would be to redesign the street so that people can't actually physically block the hydrant.”
Citizen enforcement programs, like the one the city has in place for idling, can help supplement the NYPD’s low-numbers. In fiscal year 2024 the NYPD issued 652,000 hydrant violations, according to a City Hall report. In 2024 alone there were 133,585 311 complaints categorized as “blocked hydrant.” But even if New Yorkers report blocked hydrants to 311, it doesn’t mean the car gets moved, even if it is marked as "resolved."
In fact, the NYPD can take as little as 14 seconds to resolve 311 reported parking complaints — an impossible amount of time to actually resolve anything — leaving cars to block fire hydrants with impunity, a study found.
McClure says he’s put in hundreds of 311 complaints for the hydrant nearest his home over the years, which is usually blocked by a parked car.
“There's an overwhelming lack of enforcement,” he said. “In all my 311 reports about illegal parking in front of the fire hydrant, the report is closed, and the car is still sitting there, and there's no ticket on the windshield.”
It's unclear if citizen enforcement would have saved the life of the still unidentified 37-year-old victim of the fire that began early Sunday morning on 80th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues in Bay Ridge. Firefighters responded to reports of a fire, but when they arrived, they found two parked cars blocked the nearest hydrants, delaying the rescue effort. A woman and child were in critical condition, in addition to the fatality.
The FDNY shared photos of the illegally parked cars, but the plates are not visible. A representative for the agency told Streetsblog it does not have the license plate information.
