Parking Placards

Get ready for a lot more car traffic and illegal parking around New York City schools. The de Blasio administration is returning to a system that enables widespread abuse of parking privileges, with the Department of Education agreeing to hand out parking placards to any school employee who has a car and requests one, reversing reforms instituted during the Bloomberg administration.

Mayor de Blasio's forthcoming congestion plan won't call for traffic pricing, but the mayor has plenty of other options to reduce traffic congestion. Here are four policies that would provide much-needed congestion relief on NYC streets -- it's difficult to imagine any City Hall traffic reduction initiative that doesn't include some of these ideas.

Last week Inside Edition went national with the story of NYPD personnel who use illegal license plate covers to evade toll readers and traffic enforcement cameras. Reporter Lisa Guerrero found scores of vehicles in Lower Manhattan that had some type of cover to obscure the plate, and all of them also bore law enforcement placards.

Police park for free everywhere and observe the city through their windshields. They think most New Yorkers share this point of view, but they're badly mistaken.

As crews restripe Jay Street to implement a curbside protected bike lane, some sort of learning curve is to be expected. Drivers need a little time to adjust to the new parking lane, which floats to the left of the bike lane buffer. But NYPD should know better from the start.

The City Council’s attempt to return parking privileges to the New York press corps faces opposition, ironically enough, from the New York City Police Department.

Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn is one of the most important segments in the city's bike network, the key passage to and from the Manhattan Bridge. It's also a huge impediment to biking in the city -- the street is rife with double-parking, illegal U-turns, and the unnerving threat of a car door suddenly opening and throwing you into the path of a passing bus. An upcoming redesign of Jay Street should improve the situation, but it too will be hampered by the culture of parking placard abuse that pervades downtown Brooklyn streets.

Last night, DOT presented its proposal for a protected bike lane on Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn to the Community Board 2 transportation committee [PDF].