Getting Religious About Street Parking

Friday was Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, celebrating the triumph of good, represented by Lord Rama, over the forces of evil. It is a holiday that thrills some of my friends. Not that they are Hindus themselves.

The three-day Islamic feasts of Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha thrill them, too. They aren’t Muslims, either.

They are, in the main, Christians and Jews. Most of them are not the sort to be found in church or synagogue every Sunday or Saturday morning. But they derive enormous satisfaction from holy days like the Feast of the Assumption or from a days-long Jewish festival like Passover.

That is because they answer to a separate authority. Their true devotion is to the Church of Internal Combustion. You probably know these people better as car owners.

Nothing delights them more than a religious holiday, any religious holiday — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, it really doesn’t matter — that liberates them from the city’s alternate-side parking rules.

In the New York diocese of the Church of Internal Combustion, the highest virtue is being able to leave one’s car parked on the street for days at a time. Church members reach this state of exaltation through a special dispensation granted by a nonecclesiastical synod, a body called the City Council. The Council is vested with the supreme authority to suspend alternate-side rules. This it does. Faithfully.

Diwali, celebrated by Sikhs and Jains as well as by Hindus, is the latest holiday to receive the sacrament of discarded parking regulations. By official count, there are 35 such holidays through the year, spread across 44 days. Council members love few things more than adding days to the list. They have done so with fair regularity.

Although some members of the Church of Internal Combustion may not believe it, alternate-side parking does not exist to torment them. The rules were created for the common weal: to make it possible for Sanitation Department sweepers to do their stuff.

Once upon a time, the main exceptions to the rules were legal holidays, when city employees are off, and certain days on which observant Jews are forbidden to drive: Yom Kippur, for example. There is no known Talmudic exception for alternate-side parking rules.

But any privilege for a particular ethnic or religious group is not allowed to exist in this city without others’ claiming it as well. And so, over the years, the Council has steadily expanded the exemption list to include all sorts of holidays with no inherent proscription against driving: Ash Wednesday, Purim, the Asian Lunar New Year and All Saints’ Day, to name a few.

In the process, the lawmakers have essentially obliterated barriers that are supposed to separate church/synagogue/mosque/temple from state. All the holidays added to the list of late are religious in nature.

Council members describe this habit of theirs as a way to honor new communities in an ever-changing city. That’s how a group knows it has made it here. We keep the streets dirty in its name.

But it is perhaps worth noting that the line between an official honor and a political pander is a fine one. A lot depends on who has muscle.

Take proposals in recent years to add St. Patrick’s Day to the privileged list. They have gone nowhere. Can it be a coincidence that the political influence of Irish-Americans has waned in the city, even if the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, is of Irish ancestry?

TO be fair, some holidays overlap, and a few fall on weekends, minimizing the impact on street sweepers. But sometimes they come one on top of another, as they do this month — 4 in the space of 12 days. That spells trouble, says the Sanitation Department, which consistently opposes expanding the list.

“It puts us up against it,” said Bernard J. Sullivan, director of the department’s Bureau of Cleaning and Collection. “It’s a little tough for us to catch up, because on those days we don’t get curb accessibility.”

Don’t think for a second that the Council is done keeping the streets dirty. Some members want to expand the exemption list to include the Buddha’s birthday, which falls in May, and Flag Day, June 14. Apparently, New Yorkers cannot show respect for the Stars and Stripes while moving their cars from one side of the street to the other.

Neither idea has gone anywhere — yet. Give it time. Hopes certainly run high in the Church of Internal Combustion.