The Problem

The Department of Transportation and NYPD issue parking permits to select City agency employees. Typically placed on a vehicle's dashboard, permits allow government employees to park their vehicles in designated areas. The permits are not meant to allow government employees to block fire hydrants, avoid paying parking meters, park on sidewalks or anywhere else they want. Yet, this is exactly what parking permits are used for. Only in the rarest of circumstances does the NYPD enforce against illegally parked government employees.

In 2006, Transportation Alternatives highlighted the problem of government workers using placards to park illegally in a report entitled, Above the Law. This study found that 77 percent of drivers were using their placards to park illegally, wherever, whenever.

Thanks to persistent complaints from community members and studies the efforts of Transportation Alternativeslike, Above the Law, the City has enacted some measures to reduce parking placard abuse.

In 2008 the City slashed the number of parking placards issued by 46 percent, to 78,000 permits. By handing out fewer parking passes each year, the City is encouraging more civil servants to ride public transit, easing traffic congestion while freeing up parking spots for others. Unfortunately, the problem of bogus placards identified in the 2006 study, is still rampant.

Despite the reduction in city-issued parking placards, the system remains broken. Each step in the process -- from creation of the placards, to distribution and enforcement -- is fatally flawed, creating a system wrought with abuse and lacking effective oversight

Specific Problems within Existing System

The current system by which New York City creates, distributes, and monitors parking placards for City employees is functionally defective. More specifically, there are three (3) key areas which need to be reformed:
  1. Counterfeit Placards: Because the current placards are essentially nothing more than laminated pieces of papers with holograms, there is an epidemic of counterfeit placards produced by virtually every union (which have no powers to do so), medical associations, hospitals, doctors, private organizations and countless others.
  2. Illicit Replication: There is also the very real problem of multiple copies of an original, authentic placard, exponentially multiplying the total number of placards existing on the streets.
  3. Transferability: The current placard system creates situations whereby individuals who have properly been assigned a placard subsequently improperly "loan" this placard to all sorts of third parties.

The Price

  • Increased cruising for scarce parking spaces decreases the likelihood that delivery vehicles will be able to reach the curbside, thus compounding double parking.
  • Illegal permit parking degrades the quality of the air that New Yorkers breathe, which leads to increased risk of health problems like asthma, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
  • Illegal permit parking erodes the trust in government and law enforcement in the communities that are overrun by vehicles.
  • The nearly effortless ability to reproduce placards allows for the mass amount of fraudulent placards and further illegal parking.
  • Loss of City revenue, when illegal placards pass as legal at metered parking spaces.

Recommendations

  • Add bar codes to parking placards.
    Bar codes, those black stripes used by businesses to track product inventory, would vastly cut down on fraud. With a quick swipe, parking enforcement officers would be able to tell the real permits from the fake. In February 2011, City Councilman Dan Garodnick has introduced a bill that would require all new parking placards to contain bar codes, bringing the system into the electronic age.
  • More enforcement of illegal and bogus permits.
    The NYPD and DOT, the two agencies that jointly oversee City-issued permits, need to send a message that improper use of parking permits will not be tolerated. The NYPD should ticket employees who park illegally -- with or without a permit -- as well as anyone posting phony permits or personal effects on their dashboard to evade parking laws.
  • Annual tracking of permit use and abuse.
    The NYPD and DOT should release a report each year tallying the number of permits issued and violations handed out. Annual tracking will allow the public to tell how much enforcement is happening and whether it is making a difference.