Streetsblog New York City

The Daily News published an op-ed today that highlights the broad coalition of labor unions, business interests, good government groups, transportation advocates and neighborhood activists who want Albany to adopt the Ravitch Commission's MTA rescue plan.

Yesterday the coalition sent this letter [PDF] to every member of the state legislature. Notably, three of the state's biggest unions -- the AFL-CIO, Service Employees International, and United Federation of Teachers -- have signed on. These labor groups were not part of the coalition that fought for congestion pricing last year, but on this issue, they are firmly on board. On this issue, they're united with the same business leaders whom they're fighting against when it comes to the proposed millionaire's tax. Unlike the State Senate, these leaders grasp the implications of sharply hiking fares while drastically cutting service. They don't want to risk the region's future by letting the transit system fall apart. They do want a plan that provides a long-term answer, and that includes bridge tolls. Here's their full letter:

Dear Legislator:

We represent the citizens of New York who depend upon a safe, clean and reliable public transportation system. We represent the working class New Yorkers -- many of whom do not own automobiles -- who depend upon an affordable public transportation system to get to their jobs, to their schools and to their health care providers. We represent the employers of the region that recognize that a well functioning subway, bus and commuter rail network is the prerequisite for continued economic growth and is what sets New York apart from the rest of the country. We represent the hard-working building trades and construction workers responsible for New York’s skyline that are dependent upon public sector projects to put food on the table during these hard times. And we represent those that care about reducing the asthma rates of children in disproportionately impacted communities throughout the city and about making this city a whole lot greener, more equitable and a little bit more livable.

We represent your constituents, and we are calling on you to act and adopt a comprehensive, long term funding plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It must be a plan that provides for affordable fares, expanded service and long term capital investment. And it must be adopted now -- before the Authority is forced to raise fares and tolls by as much as 30 percent, while at the same time drastically reducing service across the system.

The New York Legislature has had long enough to act. This issue is no surprise to those that have been paying attention. Almost a year ago, Governor Paterson called on Richard Ravitch to head a Commission to review options for comprehensively addressing the MTA’s operating and capital funding needs. This Commission represented business, labor, environmental advocates and everyday straphangers. And the proposal that the Commission put forward has the broad-based support of all of these constituencies -- your constituencies. It is a proposal that is fair, balanced and comprehensive. It relies on transit riders, motorists and the employers that benefit from the system to all participate in the solution for saving the system.

Today is the first workday of the new year for city public school teachers, some 52,000 of whom have a little over a month to prepare for a commute without free parking privileges.

As reported earlier this week, the city and the United Federation of Teachers have reached an agreement that will rescind all but about 11,000 teacher parking placards, putting the number of placards on par with the number of on-street spaces allotted for school parking across the boroughs (an additional 15,000 off-street spaces are also designated for teacher use). Allocation of placards will be left to the discretion of individual school principals and UFT chapter leaders (who are also teachers), and must be completed by October 1.

Perhaps sensing unrest among the membership, UFT President Randi Weingarten, who is in Denver this week, released a missive yesterday ensuring teachers that teacher parking spaces had not been reduced, and that the deal with the city "presents an opportunity for an increase in the number of spots." This last is apparently a reference to an appeals process briefly outlined in a recent letter to Weingarten from Bloomberg Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler [PDF]. 

While in her letter to teachers, the full text of which appears after the jump, Weingarten characterizes the agreement as a win, school personnel aren't happy. Speaking to the Times, one Bronx middle school principal riffed on a previous Weingarten complaint, intimating that the best of New York's Brightest will gravitate to schools with available auto storage.

"What I think will end up happening is we’ve already got competition for teachers, and schools with parking lots will become even more desirable than they were before," he said.

It took a little longer than expected, but the City is significantly shrinking the pool of parking placards available to public employees. The total number of placards allocated to certain departments -- most notably NYPD -- has been reduced from roughly 80,000 to about 55,000, as reported by the Times, News, and Post this morning. The police will have 21,474 fewer placards to distribute, a 33 percent reduction.

Placards have also been redesigned to prevent fraud and abuse, said Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler. The News reports:

New standardized placards are designed to eliminate the dizzying patchwork of permits previously created by each agency that often stumped ticket writers.

"They were being respected by the people who were doing traffic enforcement because they looked legit," Skyler said. "If you have an old police one, you might as well have a Time magazine on the dashboard. It's not going to be effective."

Back in January United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten protested Mayor Bloomberg's mandate to reduce the number government parking placard handouts. In a letter to the mayor, Weingarten called the move "deeply troubling," and claimed that taking free parking away from teachers -- who, unlike tens of thousands of other government employees, "are not abusers of parking permits" -- would keep "the best and the brightest" from accepting jobs in city classrooms. (What this says about transit-using teachers, who must pay for TransitChek cards even as the best and brightest drive and park for free, is anyone's guess.)

Last Friday, as she announced her intention to seek the top spot at the American Federation of Teachers, Weingarten took another swipe at the mayor, and in the process further betrayed her ignorance when it comes to the relationship between private automobiles and public space.

City Room reports:

During a brief speech, Ms. Weingarten took a shot at Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, sarcastically announcing that now that congestion pricing had been defeated, the mayor was planning to require pedestrians to "put quarters in the the traffic lights to be able to cross the street."

Huh? Aside from being unfunny, this doesn't make any sense. Even the most casual observer understood that congestion pricing was intended as a deterrent to driving -- not walking, or riding a bike, or using any other means of transportation.

It would be pointless to try to figure out what Weingarten was going for here, other than a cheap laugh at the mayor's expense, but it was a revealing statement. While school kids across the city have their outdoor spaces intruded upon and poisoned by cars, and take classes on how not to get run down in the street, Weingarten sees fit to crack jokes about the failure of a plan that would have made things better.

Here's hoping Weingarten gets that AFT job, and that the next UFT head spends less energy fighting for free parking and more on getting teachers to work without their cars.

Photo: United Federation of Teachers

Streetsblog reader Richard Conroy sends along these photos and writes:

Yesterday there was an article about Randi Weingarten saying teachers don’t abuse parking permits. I found that amusing since my daily commute takes me past P.S. 161 in Harlem where there are numerous vehicles parked on the sidewalk every school day. This school is on Convent Ave.

In her letter to the Mayor, United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten claimed that "teachers
are not abusers of parking permits, and to publicly suggest that they
are is deeply troubling." The letter was a response to the Mayor’s plan to reduce the number of city government parking permits and prevent unions from printing their own placards. 

At least they’re not parking on the playground, I suppose.

A car with a teacher's permit on the dashboard is parked beneath a "No Parking Anytime" sign. The license plate number does not match the one printed on the permit. (UncivilServants.org)

United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten sent a letter to Mayor Bloomberg Friday expressing objections to his plan to reduce the number of city government parking permits and prevent unions and city agencies from printing their own. Weingarten's letter echoed Teamsters president Gary LaBarbera's recent assertion that "parking permits are a form of compensation for teachers"and other city employees (Is anyone paying taxes on that "compensation?" Is it accounted for in any city budget?)

In her letter, reprinted below in full, Weingarten makes three particularly remarkable claims:

1. "Teachers are not abusers of parking permits."
   A quick visit to UncivilServants.org (or your own neighborhood streets) shows Weingarten's blanket claim is, obviously, incorrect.
   
   
2. "Teachers do not clog areas such as lower Manhattan" with their personal vehicles.
   Not only are teachers' cars part of the Lower Manhattan traffic jam, in a city where 43 percent of elementary school kids are unhealthily obese, teachers and education officials have been known to clog school playgrounds with their personal vehicles. In one notorious case, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum intervened to stop city employees from using the Tompkins Square Middle School's playground as a parking lot in 2004.
   
   
3. Parking permits are necessary to "attract the best and the brightest to teaching" in New York City.
   Really? I'm no education policy expert and I'm sure that some teachers really do need to use cars for work, but do the world's best and brightest come to live and work in New York City for the convenient parking?
   

I think Weingarten and the unions may find that they are fighting a costly and losing battle here. The public has little sympathy for the maintenance of a city employee parking system that is so blatantly abused. Few issues draw the ire of such a broad range of New York City civic groups as city government parking placard abuse.

A recent Independent Budget Office report found that cops, firefighters and teachers drive to work at double the rate of any other group of New York City workers. Why?

As DOT Deputy Commissioner Bruce Schaller told Streetsblog in the very first post we ever published, "Free parking has a tremendous impact on the decision whether to drive or take transit." Moreover, among teachers working in Manhattan, "nearly all of these auto commuters have transit alternatives," Schaller said. His 2006 study found that ninety-five percent of the government employees driving into Manhattan from Brooklyn and Staten Island live in neighborhoods where the majority of their neighbors use transit.

No one is proposing eliminating teachers' permits. Rather, there just needs to be a more centralized and rational system for distributing parking permits based on real need. And there needs to be real enforcement. Hopefully Weingarten and the unions will realize that they are better off pushing for a parking "cash-out" law like California's than fighting to maintain their oft-abused parking privilege.