Image Credit: Michael Anton.
By Mark Chiusano
There are countless ways to demonstrate the forever-controversial nature of alternate side parking (ASP) in New York City, but only one involves Mayor Ed Koch’s voice whining from a mechanical street sweeper.
That was the gimmick the then-mayor unveiled in 1988 to encourage illegally parked cars to move, so the street sweepers could clean. “Get it outta here,” his tape-recorded voice implored.
It’s just one example of how alternate side parking – the requirement for cars in many parts of the city to regularly shift spots – annoys groups of all kinds. Sanitation officials want the cars to more reliably get out of the way, given that street cleanliness was one of the original rationales for the launch of ASP in 1950. Neighborhood residents fume at the double parking and the exhaust from cars spending 90 minutes out of place to obey parking rules. And more or less from the start, drivers have been complaining about the “unnecessary burdens to the problems of motorists,” as the Automobile Club of New York put it in 1953.
These days, the first thing you hear after calling 311 and choosing your language is an automated message about that day’s alternate side status, a sign of how much ASP continues to be on the minds of many of the roughly half of New York City households with cars. Few of those vehicle owners relish hunting for a new spot so the brooms can come through (or not, as is sometimes the case).
The last few years may have brought this narrow but intense obsession to a fever pitch, as car ownership spiked and the growth of work-from-home allowed many residents to more easily work the system, simply sitting in their cars for the street-sweeping hours or (illegally) double-parking on the other side of street before retaking a spot.
At the same time, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio briefly suspended ASP early in the COVID-19 pandemic to reduce people’s movements. He then rolled out a more “convenient” policy for drivers: shifting alternate side regulations to a mere once a week in many locations that typically had it twice weekly.
The experiment ended in 2022, when Mayor Eric Adams reinstated the pre-pandemic schedule, citing dirtier streets, but the loosening and re-tightening of the rules has gotten people with all different transportation opinions eager to rethink how New York City manages this free public space that covers over 2,000 miles of city streets.
On the one hand, some advocates support a different system entirely, arguing that those worried about alternate side parking tend to be in decent enough economic shape to own a car and pay all the related expenses, and those parking spots could be put to better use as bus or bike lanes, or rat-discouraging trash containers. In this view, the city could “free up a lot of the space that’s on the streets,” as Queens State Senator Jessica Ramos put it during a Riders Alliance mayoral forum focused on transit earlier this month. She said she would “love to lift parking off a lot of primary avenues, and other places be able to charge for parking.”
Other jurisdictions have different ways to clean along the curb – Paris deploys people with brooms – or even use the hassle of parking to encourage other transit options by offering incentives for those who forgo public parking spots.
Meanwhile, car owners tend to hate a life that “revolves around alternate-side parking,” as one driver recently told The New York Times, and they cheer for every reprieve from the weekly or twice-weekly move, like a new holiday added to the ASP calendar.
The growing list of holidays – more than 40 of them – has become a problem for the Department of Sanitation, however. During a September City Council hearing about adding the Tibetan Buddhist New Year of Losar to the list, then-Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch gave testimony arguing that too many suspensions of alternate side have led to “dirtier streets and dirtier neighborhoods.”
She suggested swapping one holiday out for a new one, saying, “We are simply at a saturation point around scheduled suspensions.”
One modest option to improve alternate side and break through the morass is Brooklyn City Council Member Lincoln Restler’s bill to increase fines for alternate side violations for repeat offenders. Rather than shell out the usual $65 per violation, a scofflaw would owe $100 for each subsequent transgression in a 12-month period, and eventually get towed after being caught three times.
At the current rates, some drivers simply treat occasional tickets as the price of doing business, Restler says. “We introduced this legislation because too many car owners had decided that it’s cheaper to not move their cars and pay a few tickets than to pay for off-street parking,” he explained.
Of the 1.9 million alternate side tickets issued in the first 11 months of fiscal year 2023, 37% of cars got more than one, and 7% of cars got more than four tickets, according to data from Restler’s office.
The motionless cars mean the mechanical brooms can’t clean as well, leading to garbage buildup and potential rat zones, but they also are hogging spots for weeks on end, an irritation for drivers just coming home from work and looking to deposit their rides.
Legislation on the state level would also attack the street-cleaning problem and encourage parking turnover by equipping street cleaning vehicles with cameras to help capture and ticket illegally parked cars, a technological improvement to Mayor Koch’s voice on the speaker.
Neither bill would delete the alternate side parking dance, which Restler acknowledges is one of the “more frustrating things” that New Yorkers have to navigate each week. But even small tweaks to this New York City staple remain difficult. Both bills face opposition in legislative bodies where many members look out for car-owner interests. Consider that in the Council, Restler’s Brooklyn colleague Kalman Yeger once advocated for his own bill on ASP fees: to lower them.
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Mark Chiusano is a Senior Fellow in New York Law School’s Center for New York City and State Law and the author of The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos.