Streetsblog New York City

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and her city-owned Chevy Suburban in 2008. Photo copyright Steven Hirsch.

To hear Christine Quinn tell it, New Yorkers are crying out for relief from unjust parking policies. Over the last two years, it seems that when City Council members weren’t flogging legislation to add layers of bureaucracy to DOT’s street safety program, they were tripping over themselves to absolve motorists of one responsibility after another.

No matter that most New York commuters don’t drive to work. Or that drivers would be best served by rational prices for on-street parking, not endless cruising for free spots. Or even that one bill, prohibiting the sanitation department from placing stickers on vehicles parked in the path of street sweepers, would put an end to a practice that has benefited the entire city by improving street cleanliness. Nothing has stood in the way of Chris Quinn’s mission to free the put-upon car owner from the tyranny of onerous city edicts.

Including public opinion, it appears. According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, a majority of city voters disagree with Quinn and the council that city sanitation stickers are “unnecessarily punitive.” The poll found that 60 percent of voters, including 57 percent who park on the street, support the use of the stickers.

Support for the yellow stickers ranges from 56 – 40 percent each in Brooklyn and The Bronx to 66 – 26 percent in Manhattan. Men are stuck on the stickers 63 – 33 percent while women want them 57 – 37 percent. There is little partisan difference.

“Even voters who park on the street and do the Alternate Side Parking dance are stuck on the stickers by a wide margin,” said poll director Maurice Carroll in a Quinnipiac media release.

You’ll recall that the sanitation sticker bill was the brainchild of Brooklyn Council Member David Greenfield, who promoted it with characteristic zeal (“I mean, what’s next? We’re going to start slashing people’s tires when they don’t park on the correct side?”). It was also championed by transportation committee chair James Vacca, who called the stickers “cruel.” Weighed against the reality of voter sentiment, such inflammatory rhetoric makes the council look out of touch. It could be that New Yorkers aren’t as worked up about this stuff as their electeds think.

You don’t have to be a political scientist to know that governing by pet peeve is not likely to result in sound policy. Now that Speaker Quinn and the council have impartial evidence that a small number of gripes doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of the electorate at large, maybe they will turn their attention to actual problems, starting with the hundreds of fatalities and thousands of injuries suffered on city streets every year.

This is not a graphic from Christine Quinn's transportation report. In fact, the report says nothing at all about transit.

If you’re like most New York commuters, you took a train or bus to get to work today. And like most New Yorkers, you are invisible to the City Council and speaker Christine Quinn.

On Tuesday, Quinn issued a letter, co-signed by transportation committee chair James Vacca, bragging about the accomplishments of a council obsessed with the perceived needs of city drivers. You know the bills: the muni-meter grace period, the elimination of the alternate side violation sticker, the loosening of parking fine deadlines. While she makes mention of the law that requires NYPD to post traffic crash data online, Quinn also touts the council’s success in adding red tape to the installation of bike lanes, a proven safety measure.

November 2010: Quinn and Vacca take aim at safer streets.

The council’s transportation achievements add up to three bills written to address the pet peeves of certain car owners, three bills that allow council members to grandstand for codifying existing DOT protocols, and one genuinely useful bill to help make streets safer.

More broadly, Quinn’s “Transportation Report” contains not one word about public transportation. Framing the council’s transportation agenda as a win for “nearly every New York City driver,” Quinn ignores the 55 percent of commuters who rely on transit. Quinn and the City Council are kowtowing to the city’s motoring elite the same way Republicans in the House of Representatives are writing legislation to please oil companies.

You can find the full text of Quinn’s missive after the jump. Have at it.

January 31, 2012

Dear New Yorker,

A special thank you to everyone who responded to our first NYC Council Transportation Report! We were thrilled with the positive response, and the feedback we received was very helpful and informative.

There’ve been a number of important transportation-related developments since then, many of which you’ll find detailed in our newest report below.

As we explained in our first issue, our goal with these reports is to stay better connected and engaged with you and other New Yorkers about the important and challenging transportation issues affecting our city and communities, so please keep the comments and feedback coming!

Read more…

On Monday we published the revised schedule for this week’s City Council hearing in James Vacca’s transportation committee. Out with oversight of the MTA budget and its consequences for straphangers, in with bills to make parking more convenient. Maybe we were being a little unfair with that post, because the person who ultimately sets the agenda for the City Council isn’t Vacca, but Speaker Christine Quinn.

Under Speaker Chistine Quinn, shown here with council members James Vacca and Diana Reyna, the current City Council has added red tape for bike projects and reduced incentives to obey parking rules. Photo: DNAinfo

A year ago Quinn made it clear that her top transportation priority wouldn’t be improving conditions for straphangers or making streets safer for walking and biking. Nope. In a city where 54 percent of households don’t own cars, Quinn focused on reducing the perceived inconvenience of storing cars on public streets.

Now the speaker is getting her moment in the spotlight from this agenda, with the passage of three bills yesterday. One would ban the Sanitation Department from placing stickers on cars that violate alternate-side parking rules. The Sanitation Department opposes the legislation, but the bill has enough votes on the council to override a mayoral veto. Another would let motorists escape a ticket if they show the parking enforcement officer a muni-meter receipt timestamped within five minutes of the violation, and the third would give illegal parkers more time before late fees kick in on their violations.

The 54 percent who don’t own cars get nothing out of this package, except maybe dirtier streets.

The real irony is that car owners don’t get much out of these bills either. The fact is that parking will remain a headache as long as New York gives away most of its scarce curbside space for free, or at bargain rates.

The City Council could learn a few things from San Francisco, where car owners are incurring fewer parking tickets thanks to a program that aligns parking prices with demand. Rather than bend over backward to address a few pet peeves, Quinn and Vacca would do more to lessen parking dysfunction by encouraging the city to move quickly with its own program to put the right price on curbside space. Instead, any time the city tries to adjust meter rates, the council is the loudest opponent.

After the jump, read the email blast that Quinn’s office sent out yesterday claiming victory against “unfair” and “unnecessarily punitive” parking enforcement.

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The City Council is again looking to placate scofflaw drivers. This time, Council Member David Greenfield of Brooklyn wants to limit cases in which the city can tow vehicles belonging to drivers who have racked up hundreds of dollars in unpaid parking fines. DNAinfo has the story:

Admitting the problem is the first step. Photo: Brooklyn Paper

“Any driver who has been towed knows that a trip to the impound lot can be one of the most frustrating experiences in New York City,” Greenfield said.

Under the new legislation, instead of towing, vehicles would be locked with devices called “boots,” which prevent drivers from moving until they call in and pay their outstanding fines, plus a $50 processing fee. Once paid, drivers receive a code that allows them to unlock the boot and drive away, as long as they return the boot.

Cars left booted for 72 hours could be towed under the bill, as could cars parked in tow zones, bus stops, crosswalks, fire hydrants or driveways.

Greenfield said the bill comes after numerous complaints from residents who accused the city of unfairly targeting them to make cash.

Drivers whose cars are towed under the current system have to schlep to an impound lot and then pay $185 in towing and $20 in storage a day, in addition to tickets, Greenfield said.

“This bill would give drivers a chance to pay their debts to the city without wasting an entire day trying to retrieve their vehicle,” he said. “It’s a simple and fair way for the city to enforce its parking laws without excessively punishing drivers.”

Retrieving a car from impound has got to be a frustrating ordeal, which is pretty much the point. Not that the boot itself isn’t a deterrent, but if nothing else this is further evidence of a City Council preoccupied with making life easier for motorists who believe laws should not apply to them.

Of course this is old hat for Greenfield, whose obsession with loosening parking regulations seemingly knows no bounds, and who a year ago went online to rant about the city clearing snow for safer walking and biking. Yet when reckless drivers inflict serious injury and death in his district, Greenfield has nothing to say.

Greenfield’s bill has been referred to the transportation committee, with support from council members including Brad Lander, Tish James, Lew Fidler, Robert Jackson and Ydanis Rodriguez.

Edison ParkFast advertises its bike parking at Hester and Centre Streets. Photo: Noah Kazis

Two years after the City Council passed the Bicycle Access to Garages law, which set aside space for bike parking in commercial garages, legislators are turning their attention back to the issue. In response to low demand for the garage spaces, a bill sponsored by Queens rep Karen Koslowitz would loosen up some of the design requirements for the bike parking spaces while maintaining the total amount of bike parking required.

A report from the Council’s Consumer Affairs Committee, chaired by Manhattan rep Dan Garodnick, lays out the current state of bike parking in garages [PDF]. The law has created 16,378 secure bike parking spaces but, according to a survey of the major garage operators, on average only 27.7 spaces are used each day. That unused space presumably has some garage operators chafing.

Koslowitz’s legislation, which received a hearing last Wednesday, wouldn’t reduce the number of bike spaces garages need to set aside. Currently, garages with more than 50 car spaces must provide one bike spot for every 10 cars, up to their first 200 car spaces. For garages with more volume than that, one bike spot is required for every 100 additional car spaces.

The Koslowitz bill would give garages more latitude in how to provide bike parking, however. A requirement that each bike be given a 2′ x 3′ x 6′ space, for example, would be eliminated, as would certain requirements meant to protect parked bikes from moving cars.

Caroline Samponaro, the director of bike advocacy for Transportation Alternatives, said she didn’t have a problem with the legislation. “The good thing about the bill is it maintains the same number of parking spots.” She said providing garage operators with some flexibility in how they provide the parking was a reasonable adjustment to a new law and that the important thing was that ample parking is still provided. “The lack of secure bike parking is one of the deterrents to people riding in New York. Parking garages can be part of that solution.”

Cost is also an ongoing concern for the Bikes in Garages law, though not one the Council is addressing. While many have cheered Edison Parking’s dollar-a-day bike parking rate, other garages have set rates so high it’s hard to imagine anyone paying them.

Amended versions of two bills adding requirements to the Department of Transportation’s public review process passed the City Council’s transportation committee unanimously this afternoon. The bills, which mainly codify current practices, would require DOT to consult with other city agencies and compile data on safety and traffic patterns for all major projects. “It is crucial that all the stakeholders are not only fully involved but also fully informed about what is happening in their communities,” said committee chair James Vacca.

Intro 626 requires the department to consult with the NYPD, FDNY, Department of Small Business Services and Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, which DOT already does. While the original version of the bill required DOT to produce a written report about each consultation, the amended version passed today only demands that DOT certify they did so.

Similarly, the requirements of Intro 671, which DOT did not endorse at a hearing held last September because it lacked flexibility, have been loosened. While the original included rigid mandates for DOT to report on the average speed of regular traffic and emergency vehicles before and after street redesigns, the new version requires DOT to post data on speeds, traffic volumes and vehicular level of service “to the extent such data is relevant to the project.” While level of service has been widely criticized as an auto-centric measure poorly suited to an urban environment, this language seems to suggest that the appropriate measure will vary with the intent of the project. The police and fire departments can set their own guidelines for measuring the impact of changes on their vehicles. The bill also requires DOT to study before-and-after crash data and post it on its website.

Each of the bills would only cover projects which add or remove a lane of traffic or parking for four blocks or more.

Next up for this visionary committee: a hearing on the MTA’s readiness for winter.

Yesterday the City Council passed Lew Fidler’s Intro 412 — the bill mandating community board notification about the installation of bike lanes — setting the stage for some showboating from Fidler, Speaker Christine Quinn and Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca.

Little-known fact: Lew Fidler's bill also requires the city to notify community boards before a bike lane is removed. Photo of Bedford Avenue bike lane erasure: Elizabeth Press

“Our legislation will ensure the Department of Transportation works with community boards and fully considers feedback from neighborhood residents on where, and how, bicycle lanes are installed,” Quinn said in a statement.

This is kind of like bragging about legislation that ensures the Department of Sanitation will pick up the trash. The city already brings bike lane proposals to community boards. The past few years have produced a long record of community board votes in favor of safer streets, as well as a few that went in favor of the status quo. With or without this bill, the bike lanes are going in where the community boards sign off on them.

Defending the need for the legislation, Vacca told NY1, “I don’t think it’s anti-bike to make sure that local neighborhoods have input as to where bike lanes go.”

Can’t argue there. Having a public process for bike lane installation is not anti-bike. What’s anti-bike is to imply that the recent expansion of bike lanes has somehow lacked sufficient public input, which is the message that comes across from the coverage of this bill.

It’s also strange that the City Council thinks it’s necessary to mandate notification for all bike lanes, but not for all changes to motor vehicle lanes. If the city wants to carve out some left-turn bays from a pedestrian median, for instance, there’s no law requiring a public hearing.

So yeah, it’s anti-bike to grandstand about the imaginary problem of community input on bike lanes when the council could be focusing on real transportation problems like the MTA debt bomb, obscenely wasteful subsidies for stadium parking, or NYPD’s refusal to disclose information on traffic crashes.

In any case, Quinn, Vacca, and Fidler missed their chance to boast about the real innovation in this bill. It requires the city to inform community boards before any bike lane is removed:

Read more…

The City Council today passed a home rule message backing Albany legislation that would allow the city to implement a residential parking permit program. The vote was 40-8. Charles Barron, Lew Fidler, Peter Vallone, and Al Vann joined four out of the five Republicans on the council in voting against the measure. (Eric Ulrich was the GOP vote in favor.)

RPP is intended to curb traffic by designating street parking for local residents. On Wednesday the council’s State and Federal Legislation Committee passed a home rule resolution supported by council members who say their neighborhoods are being used as parking lots for out-of-area commuters and sports fans.

While support in the City Council is strong, passage of the Albany bills, introduced by Senator Daniel Squadron and Assembly Member Joan Millman, is not assured. The Bloomberg administration, which introduced its own RPP plan three years ago, has expressed limited interest in the concept. Meanwhile, legislators including Republican senators Marty Golden and Andrew Lanza have said they will work to kill the bill. Even if the legislation clears both houses in Albany, the city would still have to devise and pass a program.

Then-Council Member David Yassky examines the proposed design for a residential parking permit system put forward by the Bloomberg administration in 2008.

A City Council committee took the first step toward bringing residential parking permits to New York City neighborhoods this afternoon. Details haven’t been worked out yet, but committee members signaled their desire to move forward on a system that would restrict a portion of curbside parking space to use by local residents.

While most council members wanted to see residential parking permits brought to neighborhoods across the city, the Department of Transportation opposed RPP except perhaps in the areas immediately around stadiums.

The action in the City Council today marked an early milestone in what would be a complicated path to passage. The State and Federal Legislation Committee, chaired by Council Member Helen Foster, passed a home rule resolution allowing state legislation sponsored by State Senator Daniel Squadron and Assembly Member Joan Millman to move forward. If passed, the Squadron/Millman bill would then authorize New York City to set up its own RPP program with a few restrictions. The city would still have to work out the details and pass an actual program.

The Bloomberg administration opposed the first step in that process today, testifying against the home rule amendment and the Squadron/Millman bill. While the administration had put forward an RPP system during the push for congestion pricing in 2008, today officials said that a citywide RPP program wouldn’t be worth the trouble if it’s decoupled from road pricing. Council members, meanwhile, expressed high expectations for how RPP might alleviate the traffic and parking woes in their districts.

Foster, the bill’s sponsor, argued that her district needs RPPs are needed in her district, which is just a block from Yankee Stadium. On game days, she said, Yankee fans’ parked cars block residents from finding a parking space in their own neighborhood or even being able to walk safely. Foster said cars can regularly be found on the sidewalk and in front of hydrants during home games. Fans fill up the on-street spaces despite the thousands of empty spaces in the city-subsidized Yankee Stadium parking system. “If I could park on the sidewalk, why would I pay $45 to park in a garage?” asked Foster.

Almost every council member in attendance supported the RPP concept. Parking permits are “a long time coming,” said Stephen Levin, who noted that his Downtown Brooklyn constituents had been clamoring for an RPP program for years. The district has “a real danger with cars driving around looking for a space,” he added. Letitia James, whose district includes the Atlantic Yards site, said that RPPs would ease congestion, protect pedestrians and reduce air pollution. James Vacca, the East Bronx-based transportation committee chair, said that parking permits would encourage the use of mass transit, “which is what we want in this city.” Brad Lander called RPP “the one piece of public policy that can make a difference” on Atlantic Yards traffic.

Read more…

December 2010: Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca rallies to keep parking prices low.

James Vacca is redefining the role of the City Council Transportation Committee.

If you’re concerned about issues such as the gradual collapse of the transit system, the scandalous waste of taxpayer money used to subsidize parking for billion-dollar businesses, or the shocking injustices suffered by victims of traffic violence, there isn’t much on the agenda for you. On the other hand, if you’re a car owner who’s distraught over the appearance of bike lanes, or who perceives the enforcement of parking laws as a personal affront, Vacca’s committee is at your service.

The latest indignity to garner the attention of the committee is the sticker that the Department of Sanitation attaches to the windows of cars that impede city street sweepers. While it seems like a distinctly Noo Yawk brand of poetic justice — your car trashes up the city, the city trashes up your car — according to Vacca and fellow City Council Member David Greenfield, it is insult added to injury.

“A $60 ticket or $65…is enough,” says Vacca (the fine is $45 to $65, depending on location). “The sticker is cruel, the sticker is overkill, it is unnecessary, it is excessive.”

“It’s really cruel and unusual,” agrees Greenfield, who has proposed a bill to eliminate the stickers.

Though sanitation officials say the sticker, in use since 1988, is a more effective deterrent than a fine — a point arguably bolstered by the hyperbole employed to condemn it — the safe money says the council will again bow to drivers who flout the law and order the policy altered or abandoned.

Assuming the suggestion box is open to all New Yorkers, and not just the affluent car-owning minority, what transportation-related policies do you consider “cruel and unusual”? No gripe is too trifling for Vacca’s Pet Peeve Committee.