Parking Placards

Disabled parking placards used to be ubiquitous in Portland. Until very recently, the city provided unlimited free street parking to placard holders, estimated at a $2,000 annual value. Many cars bearing these placards would remain in prime spots for weeks or months without moving.

Parking placard abuse might be most noticeable in hotspots like Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, but it's an epidemic in neighborhoods across the city. Reader Eli Forsythe sent in photos of an illegally-parked car with a placard on the dash in Prospect Lefferts Gardens last weekend.

Last week, Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn became the city's first "arterial slow zone" with a 25 mph speed limit. Now, a business improvement district on the avenue's western end is asking for pedestrian safety upgrades, and Community Board 2's transportation committee has signed on.

Reader Eric McClure spotted these flyers today on cars "up and down Jay Street between Johnson and Willoughby," in the 84th Precinct. This comes a few weeks after attendees at a public workshop identified illegal parking as a major safety hazard and a major source of dysfunction on Jay Street, where pedestrians, cyclists, buses, and private motorists all mix near the Manhattan Bridge approach.

If you own a car in New York City and need a place to park, leaving it on the street is a nice bargain. The only "cost" is alternate-side restrictions for street cleaning -- otherwise, all that space is free. It's such a good deal that in outer-borough neighborhoods, most car owners with an off-street space at home still choose to leave their cars at the curb.

A frustrated Upper West Side resident is looking to tame the rampant illegal parking and placard abuse on his block.

It's no secret that NYC community boards are highly protective of on-street parking, since their members seem more likely to be car owners than the population at large, but it was news to us that board chairs and district managers have free parking perks.

At a City Council Transportation Committee hearing today, the New York Police Department announced its opposition to legislation that would curb parking placard abuse by requiring barcodes on official placards. NYPD claimed that it has placard abuse under control and that only Police Commissioner Ray Kelly should have the power to determine what tools are used to defend against it. Testimony from NYPD and DOT also revealed that there are currently 118,000 official placards in circulation, tens of thousands more than previously realized.