Double-parking is illegal, and it forced the reporter to wait over an hour to use his car. Call the precinct? Why not call 911 and get her towed away? It's not a waste of resources; the police really do have the ability to prioritize incidents like this relative to multiple murders.

Okay, there's some informal system that "everybody" engages in. But she violated the rules of that system by not leaving her number, so that system should no longer apply.

Of course, as some of the commenters mentioned, Mr. Gonzalez could probably have gotten where he needed to go by train very easily.

This sort of thing is hardly ever a good idea. Who gets the “courtesy” and who gets a ticket? Why have a law and then ignore it some of the time? I thought the whole point of alternate side regulations was to cause parking spaces to turn over so people didn't sit in them for weeks on end. If they just move across the street then what's the point?

Still, the bigger problem is blocking pedestrian crosswalks. It's a bigger problem because it happens more often, it affects more people (pedestrians outnumber motorists), and the risks of harm are far greater than mere car-obstructing (peds are forced to walk out into moving traffic every minute of ever day all around town).

Nevertheless, the new law, while great, only deals specifically with cars in the middle of the intersection. It does not define ped crosswalks as part of "the box," so I wonder if TEAs are now ticketing cars blocking crosswalks. I was going to post a letter I've written to Assembly Member Brian Kavanagh, the Assembly's author of the bill (slips my mind who the Senate backer was--that info's up on streetsblog), but maybe I'll wait till I find out whether or not TEAs are ticketing cars blocking crosswalks, or if that even worse behavior is still, infuriatingly, condoned everywhere.