The flagrant misuse of parking placards has been an issue for quite some time and despite efforts from City Hall to cut down the number of placards out there and up enforcement, a new Transportation Alternatives study [PDF] shows it is still a huge problem. In their check of five dense areas of the city 57 percent of the permits they saw being used were either legal permits used illegally or just illegitimate permits. We wish we were surprised.
The area with the worst offenders? How about the government-filled lower Manhattan. Of the 244 placards on display in that TA saw, only found 11 were being used legally!
The problem with the placards isn't just that people are more than happy to use fake ones, it is also that even those with legit ones don't seem to understand (or choose to ignore) how they work. Of the 1,107 cars the TA found with legitimate permits, 43 percent were illegally parked (double-parked, parked on the sidewalk, blocking bus and bike lanes, etc.), which is not the point of the placards. They are supposed to let their owners park at meters without paying and sometimes park in no-parking zones.
So what to do? The TA suggests the city up its enforcement of placard abuse, but first that would require teaching agents to recognize fake placards. To that end, they (and we) support a bill in the City Council from Councilman Dan Garodnick that would put barcodes on all official placards. That way an agent could simply scan it to find out it if it was legit. They also argue that the NYPD and the DOT should "release a report each year tallying the number of permits issued and violations handed out" so that the public can keep a better eye on the issue.
While we wait (and wait) for such a report, Uncivil Servants at least continues to regularly collect and post pictures of bad permits in action.
