The NYPD is cracking down on illegal parking, but don’t get too excited.
The Police Department announced on Monday that it seized 210 vehicles in a weekend operation in four boroughs to address complaints about illegal parking — but all of the swiped vehicles were mopeds or e-bikes, many of which were legally parked or could have been issued tickets ... just like cars.
“We just want to bring accountability back. If you’re going to operate these vehicles you have to operate them within the vehicle traffic laws in New York City,” said Chief of Patrol Philip Rivera.
Rivera said nothing about the mopeds' four-wheeled counterparts, the car, many of which are illegally parked on sidewalks all over the city every day. Several examples were, indeed, parked on the curb right outside the 33rd Precinct station house as Rivera chatted with reporters. Streetsblog counted six cars illegally parked within a block of the Amsterdam Avenue precinct house (not including the line of police vehicles covering the entire sidewalk outside of the front door).
When informed, Rivera offered a very classic response.
“If we’re aware of it, we’ll tow it,” the chief responded.
The moped parking crackdown was prompted from an influx of complaints, Rivera said.
“We’ve received a lot of community complaints from 311 and other sources about the scourge of illegal mopeds and mopeds that are legally registered, but are parked on sidewalks and chained to light poles. It certainly creates a hazardous situation for pedestrians,” Rivera told reporters.
But Rivera's gaggle with the media raised more questions than answers. For starters, it is unclear how many complaints the NYPD has received about sidewalk parking by unregistered mopeds, and exactly how those complaints were communicated to the NYPD.
According to 311 data, there have been 98,949 complaints of illegal sidewalk parking so far this year, but the data do not specify the types of vehicles. The NYPD didn’t respond to multiple questions from Streetsblog for clarity on that.
And, in a video sent to the press to promote the four-day operation, groups of five or six cops can be seen removing electric bikes and even regular bikes that are locked to poles on the sidewalk, video evidence that was contrary to the press conference, where Rivera told Streetsblog that the operation was only targeting illegally parked mopeds.
Activists wonder if the officers knew the difference — a fair question, given that NYPD data does not standardize terms for vehicles, listing e-bikes, motorized bikes, mopeds, motor scooters, e-scooters, motorbikes and many other terms for different vehicles covered under different rules. Many cops simply do not know the difference.
"There's always these weird eruptions now and then. If you did this every day and every week you would actually know the difference [between vehicles] and what the law was," said Jon Orcutt, the advocacy director of Bike New York and a former DOT official. "But if you're doing it once a year or every few years, you don't know that stuff and you just get a broad brush instruction and do things that look awkward."
An officer in the video even mentions e-bikes, which are legal and do not require plates, as the goal of the enforcement mission. “We’re out enforcing [inaudible], we’ve got a bunch of e-bikes,” the officer says as his colleagues cut the lock off a green Whizz e-bike that is attached to an MTA pole.
Orcutt called the intermittent "crackdowns" a "show," and remarked upon the irony of police officials walking by cars parked on the sidewalk on the way to a press conference about a moped parking crackdown.
"The whole thing sounds like a symptom of trying to address traffic issues and safety from a talking point standpoint instead of systematically working on restoring some order and some sense of the rules in the whole city," Orcutt said. "Which is why you would walk by cars parked on the sidewalk while they're clipping bicycles off sign poles."
Mopeds are indeed prohibited on the sidewalk, whether in motion or parked. City rules state that mopeds should be parked like motorcycles, angled towards the curb on the street. But it's unclear why the illegally parked mopeds could not be given a ticket, like illegally parked cars.
Bicycles, electric or acoustic, can be parked on the sidewalk, but, confusingly, the city’s official bike rules don't have any details about where parking is prohibited for bikes.
"Parking a bike on a city sign pole is not illegal," Orcutt said. "It's sort of a grey area because the city won't say it's legal, but a property owner can't clip your bike off of a 'No parking' sign, for example. So that's way out of bounds for police to be clipping bikes randomly off of sidewalk poles, even e-bikes."
Meanwhile, New Yorkers have been plagued with an NYPD that uses the sidewalk as its personal parking lot, and a department that harasses and systematically ignores residents complaints about illegal and dangerous car parking.
Streetsblog has documented countless examples of New York’s Finest blocking sidewalks with their personal vehicles. Even the federal government got involved, threatening to sue the city if precincts don't stop the practice, which renders the already-small amount of pedestrian space inaccessible.
There's a whole line of them right by our downtown offices every single day. Of course, these vehicles are never ticketed for a simple reason:
