Rampant Placard Abuse is Mucking Up This Bike Lane in Downtown Brooklyn

Drivers with government-issued parking placards are filling up curb space set aside for truck deliveries on Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn — forcing trucks into the adjacent bike lane and undermining a crucial safe cycling connection, Department of Transportation officials conceded last week.

DOT, however, is powerless to stop the rampant illegal placard abuse without NYPD — whose habitual inaction has spurred yet another community board to call on the city to take parking enforcement out of the hands of a police department that shows little interest in it.

“We’ve had lip service to this before. We’ve had deputy commissioners from [NYPD] come and tell us they’re going to take care of it. It’s just not done. This is a refrain we’ve been hearing for 20 years,” Brooklyn Community Board 2 Transportation Committee Chair Sid Meyer told DOT officials, before an impromptu, unanimous vote on Thursday in favor of a resolution in support of giving parking enforcement back to DOT.

The committee’s vote followed a DOT update on the status of its 2022 protected bike lane redesign of Schermerhorn Street and 2023 busway redesign of Livingston Street. The two-way bike lane sees nearly two thousand cyclists per day, but delivery vehicles servicing nearby stores routinely block it — despite the fact that DOT set aside loading zones along the corridor to give those trucks a place to park.

Turns out, those loading zones are filled with illegally parking cars with government-issued placards, according to DOT.

“Unfortunately, frequent use of parking placards in downtown Brooklyn often poses a challenge with respect to ensuring these loading zones are available for their intended use,” said the agency’s presentation to the board, which promised “to collaborate” with NYPD on parking enforcement in the neighborhood.

Downtown Brooklyn has long been a hot spot of placard parking and “professional courtesy” given to illegally parked vehicles with h-vis vests or handwritten notes. Several government agencies and courts have offices in the area, making it a nexus of NYPD, courts and MTA staff who drive to work and park wherever they want.

City agencies give their employees parking placards, with the theoretical idea that the owners of said placards will only use them in situations that require them to make brief stops on official city business. In reality, the parking placards function as status symbols that alert police and traffic agents that the person parked in front of a fire hydrant or in a bike lane or “no-standing” zone is on the same team and should be left alone.

A 2024 Department of Investigation report found that there were over 100,000 parking placards in circulation between the NYPD, DOT and Department of Education. And the same impunity granted by a permit is often extended to people who may not have placards but still have some kind of vest, hand-scrawled sign or symbol of devotion to a member of law enforcement.

The placard issue has undermined multiple attempts to rationalize the streets in the area — on Schermerhorn, Livingston and the Jay Street busway. Last year, local Council Member Lincoln Restler found there were 457 illegally parked cars per day on key routes in Downtown Brooklyn. Almost 60 percent of those cars had either placards or theft vests on their dashboards.

The seemingly intractable nature of it all has residents throwing up their hands in frustration.

“A common theme of this entire conversation is a lack of enforcement is directly threatening the safety of these safety projects,” said resident Andon Keller, who attended Thursday’s meeting and suggested the committee endorse transferring parking enforcement to DOT. “That is the thing that’s in the way of [DOT] safety projects being safe.”

Placard holders are not supposed to park in loading zones unless the driver is on “official business,” a phrase that was never supposed to excuse hours-long illegal parking just when someone was at a precinct or a courthouse for their regular shift. In 2023, DOT explored a proposal to making it explicitly illegal for placard holders to ever park in loading zones, but it’s unclear if that proposed rule change was ever actually enacted.

Ben Schwed, a DOT official on hand on Thursday from the agency’s research implementation and safety unit, suggested the city’s newly announced Office of Curb Management could play a role in solving the issue of illegal parking in loading zones. Though Schwed noted he was unsure if the office would actually do that.

“One of the things that was announced this week that I’m excited about is the new Office of Curb Management at DOT,” Schwed told board members. “I know nothing about it, but I am hopeful that it will be able to help address some of these issues around loading.”

Another DOT official encouraged the board to keep complaining about the issue, as it has done for decades.

“It maybe feels like an uphill battle, but your advocacy, the advocacy of the Council members, I would say let’s hope that makes a difference,” said Chris Hrones, who works in DOT’s Transit Development division.

Rather than wait to see what the new office may or may not be tasked with doing, the committee took inspiration from nearby Brooklyn CB6, which recently passed a resolution that proposed DOT be put back in charge of parking enforcement, and voted 5-0 to back a similar resolution. Manhattan CB6 passed a similar resolution last week.