DOT Teases Closed Streets and Automated Parking Enforcement for FiDi

The Mamdani administration wants to end the Financial District’s perpetual parking problem by tackling rampant placard abuse and potentially closing off some of the neighborhood’s streets to private vehicle through-traffic, a senior transportation official said on Wednesday.

Currently, drivers use real or fake parking placards to park their cars for free, effectively stealing scarce space in the area’s winding street network. But a Department of Transportation leader said the agency is studying the problem and promised “more to come” for the southern tip of Manhattan.

“Some of it is going to be about technology and taking the [enforcement] people out of it, and some of it is going to be about [closing] the street to traffic, and then the vehicles can’t get there,” Deputy Commissioner for Transportation Planning and Management Eric Beaton said during a panel about parking regulation during Transportation Alternatives’ Vision Zero Cities conference. “It has to be a managed system, but sometimes it’s like untying the Gordian knot and you just have to ban it.”

Advocates, business groups, lawmakers, and urban planning experts have pushed to limit cars or ban them altogether from FiDi for generations. But one of the key hurdles is the city’s failure to police its own workforce — including DOT itself — because many employees drive to one of the densest parts of the country thanks to placards that effectively allow them to park anywhere free of consequences.

Beaton attributed some of the headache to civil servants’ reluctance to confront or inconvenience their peers. “There’s a tremendous amount of parking by government vehicles or private vehicles owned by government employees,” said Beaton. “There’s been a lot of courtesy, shall we say, over the years, given to not enforcing against that.”

Officials previously tried assigning enforcement duties to the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau, which typically investigates corruption. Despite that bureau’s stated mission, its cops apparently had little appetite for actually policing fellow city workers. “They didn’t even want to get into this,” Beaton explained. “It’s been very hard to do.”

Beaton’s comments came in response to a neighborhood advocate who urged the city to take action in FiDi. “If you’re pushing a stroller … you can forget about it,” said Catherine Hughes, of the civic group Financial District Neighborhood Association. “We can’t wait to hear what the city has to offer for our neighborhood.”

The neighborhood’s status quo of largely unfettered car access has not helped its businesses either, Hughes noted. She cited a recent city comptroller’s report, which found the area had a stunning 21 percent storefront vacancy, the highest in the entire city.

“We have the highest retail vacancy rate in the city … but we have the highest pedestrian traffic,” Hughes said.

FiDi is primed to become a pedestrian-first area, whether it’s through banning cars entirely or a low-traffic neighborhood. Nearly nine-in-10 people walk or take transit to get to work in the area, and only 12 percent of households have access to a car. The neighborhood enjoys direct access to nearly all of the city’s subway lines, along with the PATH trains from New Jersey, the Staten Island Ferry, and the NYC Ferry. Many express buses from the outer boroughs service downtown, too.

Hughes’s association and other downtown residents have pressed the city to convert the majority of local roads into pedestrian priority streets, with 5-mile-per-hour speed limits east of Broadway and south of the Brooklyn Bridge. Plans to restrict cars in the area date back to the 1960s.

On the campaign trail, Mayor Mamdani said that he wanted to seize on traffic reductions from congestion pricing by reclaiming space for pedestrianization “in and around Times Square and the entire Financial District.”

Beaton described automated enforcement as the linchpin of consistent traffic management across the city, because it removes drivers’ opportunity to cajole their way out of a ticket.

“There’s no discretion,” Beaton said. “There’s no, ‘Hey, I have the police sticker in my window.’ You’re gonna get the ticket, and we’ve seen that it really changes behavior. I think automated [enforcement] is going to really change behavior in a way that traditional enforcement just hasn’t in congested areas.”

Pressed for further details after the panel, Beaton said Albany would dictate the city’s latitude against scofflaw drivers. The state legislature already imposes significant limits on automated enforcement of parking, speeding and red lights.

“There’s a lot of constraints in state law around what we can do with automated systems,” Beaton told Streetsblog. “The idea is the extent you can move away from in-person monitoring towards whether it’s enforcement or data collection or just management.”