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Including public opinion, it appears. According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, a majority of city voters disagree with Quinn and the council that city sanitation stickers are “unnecessarily punitive.” The poll found that 60 percent of voters, including 57 percent who park on the street, support the use of the stickers.

It’s amazing how reliably New York motorists support harsh penalties for auto-rated nuisances, in the abstract. In the congestion pricing debates, all manner of draconian penalties for double parking were bandied about as alternatives that wouldn’t punish the good working people of New York who never double park. We didn’t get to find out if those penalties would have provided some minor gain in efficiency because of course they were dropped the moment that congestion pricing was pushed back. If they were passed, they would surely have been enforced as evenly and thoroughly as the laws against car alarms, horn honking except in case of danger, and blocking bicycle lanes.

The fact that New Yorkers support harsh penalties for acts we often commit is a mix of self-delusion, corrupt privilege (see: ticket fixing scandal), and also a dash of tough New Yawk City bullshit. Look at how we tolerate laws against drinking on stoops and in parks, even as we drink on stoops and in parks, and if we are ever accosted by police for it we will try to get out of the ticket with great passion, but if we fail we will just chuckle and pay the fine. That’s just the way of the world! (Except in most of the world.)

Recognizing this proud civic dysfunction, the best a transportation advocate can do is use it thoughtfully even as we argue for less-insane ways of mitigating simple problems like over-consumption of finite Manhattan street space, such as charging a price for using it. But yeah, bring on the jail time for blocking the box, etc!

Quinn will always fail in her quixotic attempt to play a Real Motorist, because in her circle of elite privilege she isn’t even aware that New York’s commoner oil-addicts have become experts at manipulating the parking kabuki. Lowering the stakes of a misstep removes an advantage they hold dearly over the bumpkins driving in from Pennsylvania.

Similarly, many community members complained that the traffic enforcement agents stationed at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge wave through traffic without the slightest regard for pedestrians or walk lights. When the agents are stationed there, said Crane, “there effectively is zero pedestrian crossing time.”

And as we all know, this is what “TEAs” are “told to do”. But by whom? We have a police force simply to enforce the law, and there’s no law that says to prioritize motorists at downtown intersections. We have a city DOT to manage traffic, but they do not seem to be in charge of these malignant TEAs.

Who is directing TEAs to rob pedestrians of our crossing time, and how do they have the authority to dictate city traffic policy with such lethal ineptitude?

Half of all pedestrians hit on Delancey Street are struck while they have the walk signal, according to Benson.

Yet no where near this proportion of incidents leads to a criminal trial, where facts can be determined fairly. Is it not even potentially a crime in this city to drive vehicles over people following walk signals?

Parisian cyclists have won the right to go through red lights following a fierce debate over their claim that the move would reduce the risk of road accidents.

A three-year campaign by cyclists’ associations — which say it is idiotic for them to stop at traffic lights — bore fruit when the Government published a decree authorising councils to change the rules.

If only our leading New York advocacy groups were similarly in touch with the murky reality of cycling in city streets. Nothing is black or white, certainly not whether it is always wrong or dangerous to cross against a light as a pedestrian, or a cyclist. As everyone who walks knows, half the time when you disregard signals it is to avoid conflicts with impatient motorists. You see that the street is blissfully, momentarily clear and you cross it—why should you not?

Our traffic laws are a central component of a system that kills hundreds of New Yorkers a year, while other cities enjoy far lower fatality rates. People who think that our laws are beyond criticism, that questioning current law is anything other than healthy democratic engagement—they need get their heads checked. Perhaps their crash helmets are on too tight.

This is really outrageous. DOT hired a corps of pedestrian safety managers in response to one politically motivated Daily News editorial about “pedestrian perdition” on the Manhattan Bridge, even though there had been no deaths, just the random complaint of an editor who got yelled at by a cyclist one day.

But a little girl died crossing the street and there’s no response to Silver and no pedestrian safety managers deployed to keep people alive? How tone deaf can the DOT be?

If the DOT wants to disprove the meme that it does not listen to the community, this is not helping.

Hiring those $80k / month “pedestrian safety managers” to loaf around on cycling paths that demonstrated no safety problem was a low point for the DOT, if not the human race generally.

MacNeil said that the genesis of the slow speed zone requests came in a survey she sent out to neighborhood residents last fall, asking about their transportation priorities for the neighborhood. Traffic calming came in at number one, both among residents on larger avenues and smaller residential roads. ”The slow zone seemed like a great way to systematically address a lot of the concerns that were mentioned,” MacNeil said. In a follow-up survey specifically about the slow zones, MacNeil heard from a number of residents asking for the slow zone to extend out to their block, but not from a single person opposed to the idea.

Crucially, safer streets when people are in control of their own on blocks. No one likes the constant noise and mortal danger of speeding autos outside their door. Whether or not they are total hypocrites when it comes to driving on other peoples blocks, we can skip being futilely disappointed with the human race by just letting residents make the right choice for what’s closest to them.