Bloomberg Backtracks on Parking Tickets

The Mayor on the John Gambling Show this past Friday

1010WINS: Bloomberg: ‘Deal With It’, Council Members ‘Angry’, Mayor’s Apology.

Click Here for NY1’s newscast of this event

A day after telling New Yorkers to stop “griping” over parking tickets issued to snowbound cars, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg issued a rare apology and promised to waive all tickets handed out today and Thursday for alternate-side-of-the-street parking violations.

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience to people, but you know you have to make decisions and each of these storms is different,” Mr. Bloomberg said in his weekly radio program on WABC-AM.

The mayor’s apology came after drivers across the city raised a furor after city plows trapped their cars in rock-hard snow banks and traffic enforcement officers swooped right in to ticket them for not moving their cars to the other side of the street in accordance to alternate-side parking rules.

The turnaround was striking for a mayor who rarely backs down amid public outcries, but he said on the radio that he had heard what the people were saying.

“In retrospect in some parts of the city there was not that much snow, and in other parts it probably really was an imposition,” he said. “We did get a lot of calls and listened very carefully to what the Sanitation Department heard, to what our Community Assistance Unit heard, took a look at what calls came into 311.”

About 4,000 violations were issued on Thursday and more were being given out today by officers who had not received word of the rules suspension, the mayor said. But Mr. Bloomberg said the tickets would be wiped off the city’s parking enforcement computer system.

“If you received a ticket yesterday or today, you don’t have to respond to it,” he said.

The decision was a complete turnaround from Thursday when the mayor, besieged by complaints, responded defensively.

“We want to get the snow and ice off the roads as quickly as possible so emergency vehicles can get through, so that you can get to work, so that the kids can get to school,” he told reporters at a news conference at a Sanitation Department garage in Queens. “And if we all do it together rather than griping, we’ll be better off.”

This morning he said the storm, which dropped two inches of snow followed by freezing sleet and rain, had made cleanup harder than usual. The relatively light snow contributed to the city’s initial resistance to suspend alternate-side parking rules, which is routinely done after major snow falls. The dropping temperatures that turned the snow to hard ice so quickly is what made cleanup difficult in many neighborhoods.

“People that moved their cars, you did help the plows, they didn’t get every place and help in every case, but on balance they did,” Mr. Bloomberg said this morning.

As for the next time the city experiences a snow fall, the mayor issued this as a guideline: “We’ll take a look at it — if it’s a trace amount then you probably continue” with prevailing parking rules.

“If it’s a lot of snow — obviously you don’t,” he said.

Even if the situation did not approach the furor of February 1969, when parts of Queens were left unplowed for nearly a week after a crippling blizzard and Mayor John V. Lindsay bore the brunt of angry ridicule, complaints were prevalent on Thursday, when the temperature ranged from 15 to 24 degrees.

“I have to dig out the car, and where am I going to put it?” Carol Jolley, 50, asked in frustration. A stay-at-home mother in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, she used a garden shovel to excavate her Volvo sedan from a two-foot snow mound.

“Take a look around,” she said. “I have no place to put it. And then when I come back, this spot will be gone. All my good work for nothing.”

In prior years, Ms. Jolley maintained, the city usually relaxed parking rules the day after a storm. “This is cruel and unusual punishment,” she said. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I don’t remember them doing this so soon after a snow.”

Nearby, Eric Feldman, 50, a sound editor who was moving his Ford Explorer, said that enforcement of the rules served little purpose. “It’s going to make the roads more dangerous,” he said, “because you’ve got cars double-parked and some staying in place.”

In Forest Hills, Queens, Paul Goldfarb, 29, who works at Columbia University, said he woke up at 5:30 a.m. hoping the parking rules would be suspended. “I was sort of incredulous that they hadn’t been,” he said.

Another driver, Lois C. Schwartz, said, “I’m 71 years old and I did somehow manage to extricate my car today, but not without great effort, thanks to the snow bank left by a plow.” She said that “travel was treacherous” from her home in the West Village to Lincoln Center. “And where were the plows yesterday afternoon?”

After a storm, the Sanitation and Transportation Departments jointly decide whether to suspend parking rules, and the mayor said on Thursday that officials, seeking to expedite cleaning, “deliberately did not suspend” them for the two inches of snow.

Asked about irritated drivers, Mr. Bloomberg said: “They’re going to enjoy it tomorrow when the streets are cleaner than they would have otherwise been. And this was not a lot of snow. It was easy to move your car. I don’t like to get up early in the morning and have to do anything, either. I’d like to sleep in, too. But it was the right thing to do.”

The mayor, who typically takes the subway to work from his Upper East Side town house, dismissed complaints about the difficulty of moving cars. “It wasn’t like you had a couple of feet of snow, where you really couldn’t physically move your car,” he said. “You had to put on galoshes and go out there and move it.”

Michael T. Delfin, 24, a photographer in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, said it was not so easy. It took him 20 minutes to move his Ford Explorer across the street. “I cannot imagine what kind of city official would tell its residents, especially senior citizens and people with children, to go out on those unplowed ice sheets and move the car,” he said. “For street cleaning? Somebody call 311.”

Many did, flooding the city’s 311 help line on Thursday, and the mayor clearly was listening.

Article on NY1

Article on 1010WINS