I'm sick of the assault on drivers by the Mayor and his hipster sheep.

Help! I'm being assaulted by sheep!

Thank you, "Bill," for one of the most concise statements of the real elitist myth about transportation in New York.

I've been sick and tired of the pro automobile Archie Bunker types in NYC. All of them drive and are jealous of those who haven't tied themselves to an unsustainable transportation mode. As a tax paying middle class NYC resident I'm sick of the assault on transit riders by the Comptroller and his Archie Bunker sheep. In the next election I may not vote for Bloomberg, but I'm sure as hell not voting for that pandering politician Thompson.

Americans sold their soul for convenience. Trumping and squashing any freedoms or human rights which got in its way, all the while creating genocide, pollution, and divided classes of society with segregation.

It's not people "warming up" their cars that's the big problem here... it's the people sitting in their cars waiting for someone or something. (Ran into the deli, car service, picking up Junior, etc.) Mostly, these people leave their cars on to listen to the radio or to regulate temperature. Expect to see car service companies give the aircon/heat issue problems once this law begins being enforced.

This is happily one of the few areas where there is not going to be a fatal lack of enforcement:

Traffic Agents CAN issue idling summonses without confronting the driver. All that is required is a quick scan operation on their handheld computer.

One of the benefits of Garodnick's bill is that there are a lot more TEAs walking around ready to ticket than there are cops ready to issue tickets, and that's why I think this bill will work.

Also, if there IS a driver present, what's wrong with the TEA NOT issuing a ticket right away, but being able to say "turn off your engine or I'll have to ticket you?"

That way idling can be cracked down on WITHOUT people bitching about "waaaa this is a city revenue issue waaaaaa"

Kaja, are you really going to decide whether to idle depending on what kind of zone you're in? How about you save yourself the headache and don't poison MY @$#% AIR by idling, thanks very much.

Trucks end up covered in tickets regardless (mostly for standing in no-standing zones rather than double-parking) - tickets they don't even have to pay, because of this:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dof/html/parking/park_commercial_fleet.shtml

The limitation to school zones is mere additional absurdity. How am I, as a driver, to know which idling law applies to me? School zones aren't exactly clearly marked.

This looks like yet another way to drive down citizens' respect for the law.

I will also bet you any amount of money that circling and hunting for parking produces at least two orders of magnitude more pollution than the difference between a one-minute-idle and a three-minute-idle.

Who is going to enforce these rules?

Traffic agents don't like to enforce any rules that require them to confront private citizens (and I don't really blame them, given the flack they get from people getting parking tickets), and is the NYPD *really* going to do anything about this? C'mon.

I used to work on 21st street between 5th & 6th ave in Manhattan, where there's a school mid-block.

Starting at roughly 1pm, school buses would start to show up for EOD transport. Aside from all the congestion they would create by parking (and double-parking) on a busy commercial side-street, all the drivers would sit there for hours, idling. From what I've seen, that's not uncommon around most schools.

I don't see that changing one bit under the new rules.

A meaningful and real crackdown on idling will accomplish so much of what the Mayor supposedly wanted in his grand sustainability agenda. This should have been item 1, rather than taking two years.