n8han archive rss twitter coderspiel

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.

How does having the ‘legal right’ to park have anything to do with how parking should be priced? I have a ‘legal right’ to rent an apartment in the most prestigious street in my city. The fact that I, like most people, can’t afford to do so has nothing to do with whether apartments should be market-priced. Of course, if significant numbers of people can’t afford any decent shelter we must look for solutions. In market economies, those solutions are (usually) targeted and don’t abolish market pricing for real estate generally. In any case, surely parking in busy urban streets is much less of a basic need than housing.