NYC allows citizens to report idling vehicles in exchange for a cut of the fines
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Most restaurants have a way to signal the kitchen that an inspector has arrived and they'll quickly toss everything they are cooking into the garbage because it's cheaper than getting a fine. Former mayor Bloomberg's planned crack down on soda drinks was more about issuing fines for not serving precisely 8oz of liquid - though the next mayor dropped it and all the special order measuring cups for the health inspectors went to a warehouse.
I've witnessed a fleets of NYPD tow trucks clearing out streets of UPS and Fedex trucks. They know what time the delivery companies hit various parts of town and they are ready for them.
Recently the New York fire inspectors have started fining landlords for debris in the hallways (debris = amazon deliveries left at the door). So now if the delivery comes to the door you have to get it before the building super throws it away to save the landlord from being fined, if it gets left by the mailbox then the food delivery people steal it on their way out. No winning.
About ten years ago there was a good samaritan going around feeding parking meters to keep people from being fined. He was arrested and taken to jail. They let him go without charges but not before he spent the weekend - because the person who processes releases doesn't work on weekends they said. I think he sued and ended up settling out of court.
Someone else in this thread pointed out "the city does not make getting the payout easy and it requires many hours of follow up to maybe get paid." So now we should be at least a bit cynical, and start asking questions about why it's so difficult to get paid. Maybe legitimate reasons like verification that they aren't just making it up I guess? If a fine is issued though then can't we simply assume the person reporting was being honest? Who benefits from a difficult collection process?
A difficult payout process disincentivizes reporting, but only after you discover the hassle of it. So this could be a quick cash grab w/ dismal long term benefits once the word spreads. They should definitely fix that (assuming they want to).
The streets all smell like piss and walking at night means seeing tons of rats.
The subways are absolutely disgusting and there's always a car that reeks of shit (you can tell because that car will have far fewer people than the surrounding cars).
I don't know if New Yorkers have never visited any other cities, or if they're just so blind from all the NYC-exceptionalism (Ayy if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere!!!) but that city is disgusting.
A subway car that’s vacated due to smells, while it happens, is extremely rare, and the average station is just as clean as any I saw in Rome or Paris. There are definitely exceptions to that, and the worst case is worse than what you’d see in the rest of the developed world, but it’s still an exceptional experience to see something or smell something terrible in the subway system.
I’m always going to new events, parks, restaurants, museums. Transportation’s extensive, cheap, and quick for the most part. There are rivers, beaches, woods, bays. Biking is becoming a real joy with all the new bike infrastructure. Love the new outdoor dining scene, the people, incredible amounts of architecture styles.
And besides, we upgraded from piss smell, to weed smell! Much better.
I have experienced pretty much everything in GP’s post (although the way they go on you’d think it’s a near constant which I don’t think is true even in the rougher neighborhoods like Brownsville that I’ve lived in) at some point or another… they’re just not the parts of NYC that I focus on I guess.
That’s what I think about when I’m in NYC, and sure I see the piles of trash… I just don’t really care. It’s a necessary part of having a gigantic megalopolis. Are there downsides? Certainly. Calling it Stockholm Syndrome when I and many others in my situation have both lived elsewhere and could leave tomorrow? That just seems like a laughable failure to see things through a different view point than you have.
It’s fine not to like a place, it’s the whole “I don’t like it so you must be deluded by ‘if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere’ and have Stockholm Syndrome” part that seems a bit like a mindset that’s not great at accepting other view points or ideas.
this is fine.
there are many other giant megalopolises in the world that somehow manage not to have giant piles of trash everywhere. london and tokyo for example. demand better from your government.
“The streets all smell like piss” genuinely sounds like a take from someone that visited midtown while on a three day conference and then left. There are some disgusting streets, no doubt. There’s too much trash on the street on trash days. On rare occasions a subway car has homeless people in it and it smells. None of this is great by any means. But the idea that all New Yorkers are walking around smelling piss 24/7 and saying “huh, guess it must be like this everywhere” doesn’t pass any kind of sanity test.
Reminds me of the Principal Skinner meme: “am I wrong? No, it is the eight million inhabitants of NYC who are all wrong”
Some streets do smell like piss at some times. The building superintendents periodically hose off the front sidewalks to wash away the dog urine, especially during the hottest parts of the summer. Especially on nice streets.
in my city we somehow contrive not to have any streets at all smell like piss, ever. in the civilized world we stopped using streets as outdoor latrines over a century ago.
Cleaning the subway cars overall is a joke - they have people with mops at the terminus stations and they get 30secs to 2 minutes to mop the first and last cars before they go out again. All the cars in the middle just accumulate debris and stains until the train is taken out of service for regular maintenance.
One side effect of the pandemic is I have to leave the apartment so infrequently that I can take Lyft everywhere and still come out ahead of what I used to spend on metrocards - I don’t miss riding the subway at all.
Then, I think we can pin-point exaggerations from objective truth. I admit, when I visited NY, it was very nice but we went around central park and such.
I just dislike this law, this is a great way to make NY city worse - pitting citizens against each other. There are other ways to solve this issue through proper law enforcement channels.
Unfortunately for New York, the closest they have is NYPD, which I don't think I've ever heard anything good about - but have heard plenty of bad.
Better than the old pollution from the 1970s.
When I first came to the US, in the late '60s, or early '70s (I think I visited before moving to the US), we came on a ship, which docked in New York.
My mother brought me out onto the deck, one night, to smell New York. We couldn't see the lights yet, but I remember that nasty, metallic stench.
In most places, when an identifiable group of people, (e.g. city government employees) is such a bunch of jerks to everyone they would normally be abused right back until they stop being jerks.
Imagine if the government of Detroit acted that way. The inspector would come out to find their car on blocks three days a week and nobody would admit to having seen anything.
This is in the supreme court right now, hopefully it gets overturned and average people can start protecting themselves. We have the same BS law in CA…”prove you need a conceal carry, no death threats aren’t enough…”
NYC's arbitrary enforcement schemes should make even the most ardent statist cringe.
The police said it’s usually a two-for. The people get paid to dispose of bulk items that the sanitation department won’t accept then they dump it in someone’s driveway and pocket the cash. Then they come back a few days later to see if it’s still there, if it is then they know the house is unoccupied and they’ll come gut it for copper. Luckily I came home before anything else happened.
* Illegal parking and idling are out of control throughout the city. This has been the case for years, but it’s reached new heights since the pandemic. Trucks and cars often idle because they’re parked illegally.
* The city DOT, for a variety of reasons, is reluctant to redesign streets to prevent this behavior (e.g. by adding loading zones)
* The police are reluctant to ticket for this behavior, and frequently idle in their police cars throughout the city.
If a bounty system feels desperate/problematic, it is. Our city agencies have failed to deal with this problem and people are pissed about it. My hope is that this program is a bandaid until larger structural issues with the DOT and NYPD are addressed. We’ll see.
Walk down any street in Greenwich Village and you'll see a plethora of $100k+ cars. We continue to subsidize parking for literal millionaires because Dave in Crown Heights is afraid if we get rid of street parking in Greenwich Village they're going to come for his parking space next and he can't afford paid parking. Why does Dave need a car at all living in Brooklyn? Good question...
So we have people who park in the same place without moving for 11 years [1].
[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-street-bookselle_n_9...
I'm not defending the vast street parking problem (although you underestimate how many of those cars parked in Greenwich Village are actually not residents there at all but traveling from outer boroughs or LI or NJ). But it's a little bit more nuanced than, rich people with all the cars.
The amount of cars in Manhattan swells considerably during the week due to commuters, for one thing. You can observe the traffic patterns on Google Maps each direction on the FDR, Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, etc.
Maybe resident parking permits should be considered.
Street parking is figuratively the third rail of nyc politics.
": in effect : VIRTUALLY —used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible"
This question bugs me quite a bit, mainly because it shouldn't matter why someone needs a parking space; there are many valid reasons that I'm sure you could think of if you spent even a minute thinking about it. If someone does actually need a parking space, there should be some way to have one that takes into consideration scarcity and other market forces so Dave can decide whether it is worth it to live there/continue living there based on his own needs and means. Many cities have systems for this that usually involve permits that need to be paid for and while I'm sure none of them are perfect, it's better than subsidizing spaces or outright banning them. And if the locality decides that there just can't be any parking spaces, so be it, but it should not be because those deciding are completely lacking empathy and are so unimaginative that they can't think of a reason why someone might want something as benign and common as having a car in a city. Driving, parking, private car ownership, etc as a whole and clearly imperfect, but the reality of public transportation, especially outside of cities and in the United States, is abysmal.
Sounds like Dave is right to be worried. In the span of one sentence you went from mocking the notion that some people are defending millionaires’ parking because of a slippery slope that would lead to them losing their own parking, to begging the question on why this non-millionaire even needs a car.
Edit: It feels like something along the lines of: “Don’t be crazy, we are not coming after your parking stall. We are coming after your car.”
[0]: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/01/14/up-next-for-dot-city-...
DeBlasio is said to have been very loose on parking enforcement of 'placard abuse' as they call it. It's pretty obvious downtown during the week and also downtown Brooklyn. The City picks winners and losers just like that.
Couldn't they just park illegally and not idle. I'm a driver who's parked illegally many a time and never even considered leaving the engine idling. Do you get some sort of ticket exemption if the engine is going?
That’s almost 10% of the total fines paid out last year, according to the article.
I wonder what the distribution of payouts looks like. I assume it’s a small number of people collecting the bulk of the fines.
Regardless, it looks like it’s working. Idling cars may not be producing the bulk of emissions, but it’s one of the easiest places to start cutting as it’s otherwise wasted fuel and emissions.
I kid, I'm down for this sort of citizen engagement when it comes to externalities.
The whole thing just doesn't feel right. I don't care if, in this particular case, the cause is not-terrible (preventing pollution). There's just something "off" about the enforcement mechanism.
Serious crimes? Sure: Do your civic duty; call the police. But this? Mind your own business.
It feels vaguely East-German.
This is more similar to whistleblower laws that pay a bounty for taxes recovered by the IRS. In both cases the government is the one taking the action that fines the perp.
In any case, pollution is my business.
In both cases it pits citizens again citizens, which is what’s starting to feel creepy.
Or maybe they would be on the other side, helping truck drivers fight the tickets? Heck, they're VC-funded. They'll probably be on both sides! Think of it as the new "two-sided marketplace".
Pareto Distribution: 20% of the Y cause 80% of the Z
Encouraging citizens to bounty hunt each other... that's the novelty that the other states are copying.
These creepy "see something, say something" laws turn neighbor against neighbor, criminalizing behavior that would otherwise be considered acceptable, and turn passive observers into active enforcers for the sake of profit.
Again, these situations are not comparable. Idling commercial vehicles are already disallowed, this program literally gives a cut of the fine the government is going to impose.
Preventing abortion may be illegal now, but probably won't be for much longer if the rigged Supreme Court gets its way. Still, that isn't a novelty. Control of abortion has been a partisan fight for decades. Idling just doesn't attract the same constitutional scrutiny (and why should it).
The bounty hunting thing is an additional layer on top of that, however, and one that's relatively novel. It's why California copied it for the gun bounty.
The state can enforce the emission law; citizen enforcement is not required.
Yes, Texas used citizen lawsuits as a workaround for something they couldn't themselves enforce without risking constitutional ire (for now). It's a legal sleight-of-hand that wins them bonus points with conservatives while buying time for the new Supreme Court to outlaw abortion. It's disgusting.
At the same time, it is creepy for Texas, California, New York or any government to entice citizens to act as informers and tattle on each other. The social costs of that aren't just measured in less budgeting for meter maids, but also increasing social distrust between neighbors.
These aren't mutually exclusive, just two complementary, nasty things happening in government.
In all three cases, it mobilizes private citizens to factionalize against each other to fulfill some elitist agenda, creating legal conflict with a profit motive where there wasn't before. Sure, somebody might've rolled their eyes at an idling truck or silently viewed their aborting/gun-toting neighbor with contempt, but these laws encourage active interpersonal conflict in the name of the state, turning untrained citizens with no experience in de-escalation into deputy law enforcement.
First of all, a burning building isn't an criminal act (unless it's arson). It's an accident/disaster. Second of all, you don't get paid for calling 911 on a burning building. There's no bounty to collect. Third, you are not turning in a fellow citizen for something that you wouldn't otherwise have if not for the bounty. Fourth, a fire is a life-threatening situation for all involved.
A more reasonable example is "You should not call 911 if you catch your neighbor jaywalking across the street." Or, like if you catch them leaving dog poop behind, you don't need to sic SWAT on them. Just fucking talk to them and ask nicely first, and maybe file a complaint somewhere if they're really assholes. But you don't just jump to trying to fine and imprison someone for every minor offense.
And with the abortion and guns in particular, they really are none of your business. What someone does with their body or their private property, if they're not hurting anyone else, really shouldn't be policed by their fellow citizens.
If you really want to set a bounty on things that have a measurable, tangible threat to public safety -- like actual arsonists, rapists, murderers, and similar felonies -- you know, maybe that's OK by me? But not stupid things like idling your car or regretting who you fucked last night.
Should citizens police each other for eating beef? Driving older cars? Not passing smog tests? Not supporting nuclear power? Cooking with natural gas? Flying on planes?
It's not the kind of society I want to live in. It's not the kind of relationship I want to have with my neighbors. They're the kind of situations that call for carrots more than sticks, and certainly not secret police.
Edit: looks like the idling law was primarily sponsored by a city councilmember back in 2015: https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/council-member-wants-to...
It wasn't like a bunch of citizens got together to tackle air pollution, and somehow came up with that as the most sensible solution (vs, say, emissions standards or the autostop/autostart systems in newer cars, or better transit and biking). It was just some bureaucrat trying to score cheap political points by having citizens snitch on delivery drivers and such who are already underpaid and just trying to get by and do their jobs. Did this measurably improve air pollution in NYC? No, it just gave rise to a cottage industry of the equivalent of ambulance chasers.
We also have an entire planet to think about. Climate change is real, and we want our children’s children to continue to live here and for the complex ecosystem that makes it work to continue to operate healthily. To call the very justified concerns about future survival as “elitist” is unfairly dismissive.
For what it's worth, I grew up in a polluted city, studied climate science in school, and work in renewables. It's not that I don't think air pollution is a big deal, it's that I don't think the idle car secret police are a good way to deal with air pollution.
CAFE standards? Great. Point-source air pollution tracking and fines, from factories and such? Cool. Renewables-backed electric cars? Great. Cleaner, low-carbon grid mixes? Yes. Divestment from fossil fuels? Cool. All of these are actually hugely beneficial actions, but they don't require the state to turn citizens into informers against each other for petty everyday actions.
Air pollution is your typical tragedy of the commons situation, borne of the collective actions of millions of people living in an industrialized society and just trying to live their lives. It's not the sort of thing worth putting a bounty on, IMO, at least not at the individual level. At the corporate level it's a different story, cuz that's a cost of doing business and accounting for externalities and such.
All of those are better solutions than criminalizing trivial behavior and fostering a culture of distrust, all for little to no measurable improvement in air quality, just to satiate the political agenda of a politician. It's the difference between cheap political points for low-hanging fruit, vs doing the actual useful and hard work of setting sustainable climate policies that don't regressively hurt the working class while also turning citizens against each other. It's that sort of blindness to the needs of the average person that makes this sort of thing elitist.
If anything, people who don’t have to worry about these things — who get the privilege to live in suburbs with wide-open spaces, blue skies, and clean air — are the true elites. Being able to live this way is the dream of billions of our underprivileged fellow human beings who grow up in filth and overcrowding.
If idling is such a big problem, legislating adaptive technology (auto on/off) is a better solution.
If it is really about the billions of underprivileged humans and animals suffering from climate change, we need mass mobilization on the scale of the Manhattan Project or bigger, across multiple coordinated nations... not hunting down people who idle their cars more than 2 minutes. It's just the sort of thing that's neither necessary nor sufficient for addressing climate change, yet with a big social cost (distrust), which makes the working class hate environmentalists even more. It is the exact kind of elitist regulation popular in the 90s and early 2000s that caused a huge cultural backlash and created the climate divide we see now. It's not just regressive but counterproductive.
So it's not about elites vs. "regular people" here, it's about middle-class elites vs. other middle-class elites fighting over whether Johnny gets to buy and use the toys his middle-class income gives him the privilege to play with, and what kind of sacrifices we will make for the greater good. It's not regulation that is causing a cultural backlash: it's intentional and insidious cultural warmongering by a largely silent but even-more-insidious class of elites (the uber-wealthy) who fund think tanks, hire armies of lobbyists to press Congress, and discover and fund media personalities such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to pit Americans against one another and keep them distracted away from the even bigger issues we face. Democratic and existential crises are just collateral damage to the interests of these people.
This war of the narratives traces its roots to the 1960s, where the country was beginning to come to grips with racism (Civil Rights Act) and the Vietnam War. White middle-class and Greatest-Generation fear of hippies, Blacks, homosexuals, atheists, and others was easy for politicians and monied interests to leverage. Soon, think tanks and lobbyists started pressing Congress (along with the backing of Reagan, who was propelled to victory by the Moral Majority who brought politics into church) to deregulate the airwaves, leading to even more divisiveness in the media. Communication consultants like Frank Luntz (author of the so-called "death tax") were hired to sharpen the divide.
And Americans are sadly and unwittingly falling for this manipulation, hook, line, and sinker. Now it's the freaking Baby Boomers (who were part of the '60s counterculture and became the very thing they fought against) who are ensnared in it, and I fear my fellow Gen-Xers are being also being led into this trap.
I, for one, refuse to accept that any way other than massive world coordination is a pointless exercise. Major change is often the aggregate of small changes anyway. And being willing to make sacrifices in the name of health before others do (especially others who can less afford to make such changes) is what admirable and moral leaders do.
Yes, it's true that many of the flames of our culture wars are fanned by the elites on purpose. Divide and conquer. But every accusation has some seed of truth in it, and the recent environmental movement was all too good at providing easy fodder for criticism.
I think the moral purity route is a failure of both strategy and empathy. Demonizing your opponents doesn't get them to listen to you at all, it just puts them on the defensive and they'll look for any excuse to dismiss you. That's exactly how it's played out over the last twenty years, and despite all the yelling, despite Greta. We're no closer to climate solutions, but half the country is a lot less persuadable now and more hardened and inoculated against environmental messaging. They might've listened if we asked gently instead.
If your argument is that all Americans are elites, great, you've convinced the environmentalists and the bleeding heart humanitarians. Everyone else just writes you off and goes on their way. It doesn't change anything, it just satisfied some urge for moral self righteousness, and I bet that doesn't last either.
We're all pretty selfish, especially cultures of the European tradition of conquest, hierarchy, and individual power. The sad truth is that you can't really get people to care about the billions of strangers suffering from their lifestyle choices. We're just not built that way. We got here, living in middle class comfort, through violence and exploitation. It's completely immoral and completely human.
Asking for individual behavior change on that scale is a political dead end that does nothing but create enemies. It's tactically unsound and ultimately counterproductive, even if it gives you an illusory moral high ground.
Greta came and went and the world is no better now, and half the country is dismisses her as an angry young woman and never bothers to listen to her message. Meanwhile solar adoption keeps skyrocketing and cars are getting more miles to the gallon. Sometimes softer broad approaches are more successful than demanding individual behavior change. Most humans just aren't moral creatures. They're not evil, they just don't focus their lives on the pursuit of ethics. It's how we evolved; either we can acknowledge that and work with it to make gradual gains, or keep up a self righteous facade and keep making enemies instead of progress. Shrug.
Yes, it sucks that people are against each other, but the root problem is lawlessness, and that the people whose job it is to enforce the law are off doing whatever else.
What people don't realize is reducing police interactions with citizens is exactly regressive, leading to more mistrust between citizens, traffic deaths, and even pollution and climate change as per this article.
This comment on HN would have been downvoted to grey for the better part of 18 months until only recently, as a point of reference. During the Trump years assumptions would have been made about the commenter. Now I think we're all coming to agreeing that we need police to do their jobs and to hold them to it, or we get articles like this one.
That same heavily-armed force you use to fight druglords doesn't have to be the same force used for routine traffic enforcement, and maybe traffic enforcement shouldn't automatically get people scanned for outstanding warrants and such. A broken brakelight need not escalate into an armed car chase. The same way the fire department is separate from police, maybe there needs to be other institutions for tackling different situations, with academies training for different tactics that don't always involved armed conflict.
Our one-size-fits-all policing might seem relatively harmless for middle-upper-class whites and Asians, but they can be outright deadly if you're black or brown. You never really know if you're just going to get a friendly warning or say the wrong thing and be killed. The way we do policing is relatively unusual in the developed world, and very violent, and encourages both arms races and a severe distrust in certain communities. Just reimplementing that sort of system is going to get us back to the same place... armed enforcers that serve one part of the citizenry at the expense of others.
It's sort of the same thing in NYC. The city council resorts to citizen reports because they can't get NYPD to enforce the law.
https://www.amazon.com/Officious-Busybody-State-Josie-Applet...
In Anglo-Saxon countries there is a new and distinctive form of state: the busybody state. This state is defined by an attachment to bureaucratic procedures for their own sake: the rule for the sake of a rule; the form for the sake of a form. Its insignias are the badge, the policy, the code and the procedure. The logic of the regulation is neither to represent an elite class interest, nor to serve the public, nor even to organise social relations with the greatest efficiency as with classic bureaucracy, but rather to represent regulation itself.
I feel like there's far too much focus spent on chastising the sinners and not nearly enough effect spent creating vehicles where the common sense action is not to need to idle. Even hybrids may run their gas engines purely for the HVAC, we have a Prius and depending on the temperate and fan speed, it can kick on the engine even with full hybrid battery.
Let me ask this: Where is the article or city report that talks to the commercial drivers and seeks insight into WHY they're idling? Unreasonable time constraints? Cabin temp? Company policies? Let's dig into that. This "burn the witch" stuff never works long term, and we have to seek to make non-idling the rational choice not the enforced one.
It minds me a lot of these "cut speeding initiatives." They work, while they're going on, but success has been seen longer term by just re-designing roads to communicate the safe speed (e.g. planting trees, pinchpoints, et al[0]).
[0] https://nacto.org/publication/urban-street-design-guide/desi...
If we could get rid of diesel from commercial vehicles air quality would dramatically improve.
EVs are, of course, emission-free when idle. (Although, oddly, at least some Teslas still can’t open or close their windows when in the off-ish state.)
Cold air is more dense and contains more oxygen. At the same time, when the engine is cold gasoline is harder to vaporize and doesn't vaporize properly, and also can condense on cold engine parts. Running rich while the engine is cold allows additional gas to offset both of those issues.
When the extra un-combusted gasoline passes through, a secondary air injection system allows the fuel to be burned up before reaching the catalytic converter and does heat it up faster, but this is a secondary benefit rather than the primary benefit.
In that case you should prefer idling, rather than stopping the motor and letting it cool down.
I think the newer ones with the AdBlue tech prevents the soot from getting out.
Just give it a few years for the whole thing to be economically viable and for them to convert their diesel trucks to EV trucks.
I don't know the underlying reason for that though. I always assumed it was some combination of using too much fuel for starting (more than what it would consume if it was just idling) and the starting itself being a complicated process. But I could be wrong.
But then, for trains there exists fully electric locomotives, so this looks like a solved problem in that industry. All that's left to be done is phase out the diesels (apart from electrifying the tracks itself).
You could of course add a second battery, but that would add a lot of weight and complexity for a not very noticeable benefit.
Be in a car with that temperature for an hour+. It’ll be awful for most people.
there’s a series of options that all fit. there needs to be a better argument against change other than repeating the fears we’ve heard others express. take some time to see if what people tell you is true
Assuming that the OP is talking exclusively about asthetics when they specifically mention winter performance is bad faith.
IMO Leafs do a disservice to the adoption of electric cars because many of peoples' gut reactions to buying an EV (what if I run out of battery! Does it work in cold weather? Will the battery last? What about resale value) are actually showstoppers for these glorified golf carts. There are more and more options for 200+ mile range EVs that will work for more than a niche subset of Americans, but "you can buy a leaf for cheap" isn't helpful and helps spread FUD about EVs.
Is there a source for this claim? Also, what year is the modern engine cutoff? 2000 or 2010?
Perhaps unrelated, but when turning on the engine for the first time in a while the Prius will burn gas to heat up the engine. You can prevent that too by pressing the EV button right after pressing the power button. (Or maybe you can hold it down while pressing the power button?) Not sure if it works all the time.
Actually it seems like many sinners are perfectly happy to blame only the delivery drivers, instead of applying this to other vehicles (their own) as well.
a) spend a large amount of time idling.
b) drive diesel a truck.
c) run a business that requires idling a truck (i.e. commercial trucking literally gets paid to idle).
Also, if the business requires the truck to idle to run loading, unloading, and processing equipment, then the law exempts them from the requirements while using that equipment.
Same with a boat oil changes - you either sit there for half an hour and maybe oil loosens up or you go for 15 minute spin around and it's ready for sucky sucky time.
Did these people forget that operating a motor vehicle is a responsibility and privilege, not an unlimited right, that their behavior has consequences for the general public (externalities like air pollution, collisions), and that they are required to follow the law when operating their vehicle?
So ... they're just like 90% of the posters in any HN thread where driving in excess of the speed limit on the highway is discussed then?
Responsability yes, but a privilege?
If public transport were abundant and pervasive everywhere in the world that would be true. Freedom of movement is a basic right and in a lot of places, you can not enjoy that right unless you have a car.
Most of the people were born with a pair of legs, which they can use to enjoy their natural freedom. A car is still a privilege for those, even if economics “require” them to own one.
The consequences you mention, feel more like a consequence of us demanding X amount of goods in our cities each day, and having no other infrastructure to get them there besides trucks, than the drivers individual malfeasance.
If the city cracks down in idling then either Amazon will relax the targets or nobody will fulfill them.
There might also be mechanical reasons. First, according to what I've read stopping and then starting puts more overall wear on the vehicle than idling unless we are talking about a long time between the stop and start.
Second, if they are going to spend all day alternating between short delivery stops and short drives to the next delivery they might have to worry about whether or not the battery would be able to handle all those starts. The short drives might not be enough to replenish the energy from the battery that was used for the start.
Ths city's boroughs spent millions of pounds marking and building cycle lanes which are useless if there's no penalty for using them as a disruptive free parking spot. Having similar detection and penalties to cars parked in the middle of a road would improve traffic flow.
This isn’t going to change unless we set the right incentives. For the people in this thread worried about violence against the reporter, I think it much more likely that drivers will simply get the message and turn off their damn engines.
You obviously haven't tried to ask a delivery driver in NYC why their truck is running... I have done it several times in the east village, and got nasty looks and angry responses every time. I wasn't even recording or anything, just walked out of my door and said "hey man, any reason you have to run your truck right now?" And I'm also a 6 foot, not-skinny, guy.
Probably doesn’t apply to most vehicles though.
We've always given a pass to cars for the unpleasantness they bring into a city because we figure there's no alternative, that's just how the city runs. But there are alternatives now, and people are getting fed up with the noise, smells and pollution.
Even without the very well document health affects, cars are just shitty to be around when you're not inside one yourself, I think it's fair that we'd rather not deal with them when on foot or in your own home when possible.
If you're in a particularly cold winter you might benefit from it but really that's a judgement call. If you live somewhere mostly above freezing and drive a modern car, you're probably good to drive from the moment you start the car. Unless you're about to go full throttle on a racetrack, should be fine.
I warm up my 96 Nissan before driving, but I just go easy for the first 5 minutes in the 2010 Nissan.
Many late 00's engines were also designed to turn off cylinders to improve engine efficiency, but that turned out not to be implemented very well and engines died from carbon fouling. Big problem with Honda in particular iirc, and people would routinely bypass it to save their engines.
Automakers have to comply with CAFE standards and other mandates, but at the end of the day there's no mandate that an engine made with gen-1 technologies will make it to 300k miles either. Automakers don't really care if your engine dies in 10 years or not, they've put out lemons before and they will do it again.
Early CVTs failed at extremely high rates/short lifetimes, for example, and early OAT coolants like Dexcool were notorious for eating up every seal inside an engine. Early high-compression diesels had about a decade of their fuel injectors being eaten away by the abrasive sulfur before the ultra-low-sulfur highway diesel changeover. These technologies are of course completely normalized and trustworthy today, but that's not much consolation if you're the one paying the repair bills on a gen-1 lemon.
For some reason "don't upgrade to a v0.0 release of a new major version of iOS" is common knowledge here but nobody wants to apply that same logic to cars. The general public gets it though.
Now that cars have got 10 years of stop-n-start under their belt it's probably more reliable but still, it's a challenging design criteria for an engine.
Not saying diesel fumes aren't a problem either, mind... we probably need to go electric in the long run. But at the same time, on the level of personal self-interest... it's probably better for your engine to not start and stop constantly. It's just bad when everyone is idling because they don't want to start and stop. Tragedy of the commons.
This heavily depends on the temp range you are discussing.
Lubrication is the least of your worries at certain temperatures. The engine block and pistons being too cold cause problematic expansion and contraction which can lead to block cracks or permanent engine knock issues from what I've seen. This will eventually lead to needing an engine replacement.
It's a trade-off, and nobody seems to have done the science properly - it's just mechanics and engineers guessing which effect is worse.
Is this sarcasm? I can't tell because it is literally the opposite of the truth.
Interesting to me, is that when idling down a hill it does not drop, but if left in gear going down a hill it does drop in temp. It can actually get itself below operating temperature in gear going down a hill. I presume because the heat being pulled out via pumping air through the combustion chamber is greater than the thermostat would allow to be pulled out via the radiator.
Pretty typical of engines of that vintage with hydraulic lifters.
> Interesting to me, is that when idling down a hill it does not drop, but if left in gear going down a hill it does drop in temp. It can actually get itself below operating temperature in gear going down a hill. I presume because the heat being pulled out via pumping air through the combustion chamber is greater than the thermostat would allow to be pulled out via the radiator.
I didn't think that would significant but I could be wrong. Is it a diesel or gasoline engine? My guess would be the thermostat is leaking or wrong temperature.
(Manufacturing a new car releases lots of CO2.)
If it's really just 20,000 miles then frankly it might even be one of the most effective ways to turn your dollars into reduced CO2 expenditure.
I did not claim climate-friendliness, but environmental friendliness though.
Also, it was my understanding that most of a (ICE) car can be melted and reused, so maybe the mining impact is lower but I don't know what the real world consequences are.
Not to mention all the other inequalities in society. They mentioned volunteering, If it’s good they should probably be compensated more than some worthless crypto tech bro for example, and should have a good van. But we have to work in the current system.
Until then, we need people to do what they can. We’re talking about commercial vehicles - either the owner will bear the cost, and make it clear to employees not to do it, or they won’t, and people will learn quick smart to turn off their engine anyway.
In 95% of cases, people aren’t doing it with the intention of being anti-social - they’re just not aware of it. This sort of enforcement scheme is the kind of thing that changes cultures, starting with polluting corporates.
I need to stop commenting late at night.
However:
- most cities, witch means most densely populated areas of the planet and where most peoples live, can't do that, simply there is no physical space.
- we probably can't produce enough batteries, in natural resources terms, to substitute all ICE cars, and keep producing them when after just 5-8 years initial batteries are dead (we still do not have viable way to recycle).
If you follow the press you've might have read things like:
- https://www.motorious.com/articles/features-3/uk-eliminating...
- https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3vny5/glorified-electric-go...
etc witch clearly depict a future of a divided society: a small minority living in modern homes, with p.v. et al. to meet their energy needs, e.v., perhaps flying ones (witch might be cheaper than keep up a big road network in the actual climate change state) and the rest confined in modern smart cities, closely similar to factories or prisons, oh something like:
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/worldeconomicforum/2016/11/10/s...
- https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/how-w...
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/19/why-greeces-ex...
- https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/34827717.html
etc. I honestly do not know what can be our (humans) options so far, BUT certainly I do not like decisions made by those who are actually responsible of our tragic evolution. Personally I quit a large modern city toward a served-enough mountains area, building a new modern home, with insulation, anything electrical, p.v. with lithium storage to power and backup, with various backups (nearby water source, water recuperation at home, emergency/for pleasure airtight wood stove enough for heating the house etc) and the above depicted future society might be even good for me: as long as I can get services (food, tools, meds etc) my own personal life is already, still remain if nothing of that happen and can remain if such evolution happen, better than before, but such new society can't last longer. No society where too large part of population are pushed toward India's caste-alike isolation between cohort of people can really last much, especially in modern times where we need enough smart people to keep out tech up.
If you live in a city and thus don't have a private parking space, then you should be using mass transport. Cars don't work in high density areas.
I live in the country in the UK, I do have a bus, it runs 6 times a day and doesn't go in the right direction or right times for most purposes, but the total mileage we do is easily charged from an extension lead, and solar on the roof would provide more 15,000 miles of power over a year - far more than we use.
However the cost of both an electric car and the solar installation isn't worth it, because we don't pay externalities for the carbon production.
And do have also the ability to produce electricity with a usage pattern that permit self-charging the car? Electricity grid are a bit complex to be kept up, to be more precise generators need time to step up produced power and time to step down, that's why we make large enough grid to average the load on generators counting on a big enough user base to have a nearly constant load on the grid, small variations of loads can be sustained. Slowly charging a car, test on few friends cars, means around 15-20A witch yes is not exceptional BUT if many people charge their car during the night that means a spike load, a significant one, on the grid, something no actual grid can sustain. Remember: we do not have "big hyper-condenser batteries" to absorb a spike while generator step up and we do not have "energy sponge" to dump excess of energy once a load drop and the generator need a bit to lower it's produced power. That's the very same problem of domestic p.v.: if they are connected to the grid it's the grid that sustain initial spike while the solar inverter step up, and it's the grid sustain final spike receiving the excess of energy while the inverter step down. If your load surpass injection limits your inverter will disconnect loosing power completely to do it's best to keep a constant frequency on the grid.
We have invented the CONCEPT, since so far exist only on paper and small scale experiments, of smart-grids, to mitigate that big problem: in a smart grid nodes talks each others to say "hey, get ready to produce more energy, I'm about to soft-start from x to y", generators can potentially answer back "don't, we are overloaded" or "ok, we get ready for you". E.v. in the game can provide batteries + inverters to quickly intervene backing up the grid segment per segment. Similarly in case of disruption they can keep a house powered connected to it's micro-grid + anti-islandic system to avoid injecting to the grid. So far we haven't such networks, we have only ideas and experiments. It will take decades (one it's not enough, for all not so small countries) to implement them at a certain scale.
> If you live in a city [...] then you should be using mass transport.
Witch is an enormous issue alone: mass transport are very costly and very inefficient, they are efficient only when fully loaded, exactly when people do not like them for the crowd. But we need to move 24/7/365 not just in peak time, so public transports are complicated and bad in terms of energy saving and outcome service. They are pushed just because there is a hyper-push against personal ownership and autonomy at any cost. But the truth is that public transports are needed in dense cities, but are absolutely unsustainable and dense cities are. Some want them, just because dense cities means mass surveillance where very few can rule many easily, also making them dependent for anything. Even accepting that big liability in cities you still need cars: you have sometimes to go outside, you have to transport heavy/bulky stuff, witch can't be done on public transport. People who work in the city need vehicles just because a plumber, an electrician etc always need a not so small set of tools with him/her etc.
> However the cost of both an electric car and the solar installation isn't worth it
True, and that's why to push the Green New Deal they artificially hyper push up energy prices, both to finance massive private investments in energy production and transmission and to force people who can to buy the Green New Deal stuff and the others to starve sliding toward State subsides at State (of course, not Democratic state but one run by private neoliberal interests) rules. That's already happen. When I've made my new home I know it was not economically interesting BUT I've smell rodent and decide to accept the capex, now in just few years it start to be economically interested. E.v. are still too expensive for their MTBF but I'm pretty sure in few years with energy prices that keep skyrocketing they'll became interesting. As a result I'll spend far more than without the neoliberal economy but still far less then embracing it. Most who live in classic homes and cities will simply have no choices: they'll sell their own homes to some private giant that will rebuild them in new homes for who can afford to buy or rent, or to the State in exchange of provided social housing at provided condition reaching the (in)famous "In 2030 you'll own nothing" from the World Economic Forum agenda. If you are in the UK I suggest Mark Carney (ex head of UK national bank) book "Value(s): Building a Better World for All" it's essentially written black on white, of course, with different tones, but equal picture for the future.
If the truck is 'idling' with the electricity flowing from its batteries, the pollution and climate impact is just dislocated in space and time to the power plant when the truck is charging.
If the truck is off, then there is no problem, but now ICE motors also can automatically turn off and on.
An EV engine just stands still. If people use power, they draw that from the battieres, however this energy is not wasted but employed for something useful.
True, if it's idling, but many (most? all new?) ICEs now automatically stop when the car stops.
Trash collection just dislocates rotting food scraps and garbage from city streets to a landfill. I think it's an acceptable arrangement!
I assume the vehicles are idling to keep the heater on, or the engine warm. Also, it seems like diesel is different from unleaded gasoline in terms of what engines can do or not.
Isn't that the major point (aside from get the heck out of the way) of these anti-idling laws? Reduce the localized noise and air pollution.
Also NYS gets a ton of electricity from carbon-free sources.
Currently only ~2% percent of vehicles sold are electric. Going to take 10 years just to get to 50% of sales. That's not even including commercial vehicles.
TLDR - it's going to take somewhat longer than that.
When I was in Adelaide circa ten to fifteen years ago I recall the local food and beverage manufacturers all had signs to the effect 'strictly engines off inside'.
Nothing worse than a workshop full of diesel soot, though the exhaust urea fluid (AdBlue) in the newer trucks does give it a distinctively more breathable aroma, so there's that.
Very annoying.
15 min, full film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJYaXy5mmA8
I mean, it's just constant non-sense. For example:
1. The guy is apparently completely unaware of the laws of his home-country, comically confused about everything.
2. Apparently he entered the country without exchanging his money for the local-system, then is constantly confused that his money doesn't work.
3. Apparently it's highly illegal to pay other peoples' fines (why?), but instead of just declining such illegal payments, it accepts them (why?), then sets off all sorts of dramatic alarms.
4. Unpaid fines stop peoples' cars instantly, even while driving down the road.
5. The last scene shows prisoners relaxing, sipping wine from wine-glasses. Even though they're prisoners, in a country where alcohol's illegal.
1. he's a visitor, who left the country years, seems like decades ago.
2. he's been away for decades? and now the country is no longer what it used to be?
3. artistic license to demonstrate a point? do you expect films to be some pedantic, step by step, black and white, logic device? It's art, and like life itself, it's not always logical. Fraudulent payments go through as well in real life, but clearly they shouldn't, because they are illegal? Perhaps some citizens are exempt from this rule, and so they allow payments, but punish those not allowed to pay? Perhaps there are many other reasons for it, say, why decline it, instead of taking that money, and fining the other person, that way the "criminal" has less money to begin with, and perhaps that was found to be the more effective punishment?
4. tesla can park itself, why can't it park itself automatically once you are found no longer fit to drive in transit?
5. they are "free". in a "prison". are they free in their "home? is there a difference? It really is the point of the entire short.
what it supposed to be? it's an award winning short.
a little more from director himself, on what this is: https://greekcitytimes.com/2021/03/13/utopia-youtube/
But that video's too much like, "If they pass this law I don't like, aliens will invade, earthquakes will shake, and volcanos will erupt!".
If you want to make a real point that people care about, it has to make sense. You can't just make up non-sense, cite "artistic license", and expect people to believe it.
As for legitimate reasons to leave it idle, I have no idea.
Air conditioning/heating
If you're talking about the cargo, the insulation will easily keep up over an hour or two plus of being stopped.
In the winter, it’s more common than putting gas in your car. It’s kinda odd explaining this though
We use ice scrapers. :) As a matter of self-reliance and/or common courtesy.
Defrosting the windows with the engine is really not nice, especially not when it’s a diesel with the fumes hanging in the winter air and going inside people’s windows and into baby carriages and kindergarteners’ noses.
If they really want to make a difference, they should enforce this against individuals too, not just companies. Lots of people leave cars idling when waiting in the heat/cold/rain. That adds up too.
(Besides: it's a strange thing to appeal to when one side is physically assaulting the other.)
>(Besides: it's a strange thing to appeal to when one side is physically assaulting the other.)
To many people there is not much difference between physical and economic damage. Add in the perceived personal disrespect and that's why you get fights.
Thanks, that should be all we really need to see here.
> The externalities should be charged where they occur
You can walk to the farm and negotiate with the farmer to buy from him rather than allowing it to be transported back by diesel, are you doing this or is this just more hypocrisy?
I've never said that I shouldn't be allowed to buy food. I simply believe that when I do, I should pay the true cost of it.
> You can walk to the farm and negotiate with the farmer to buy from him rather than allowing it to be transported back by diesel, are you doing this or is this just more hypocrisy?
You have an oddly black and white view of the world. There are plenty of things that I think we should change that currently benefit me. I can participate in the system while still recognizing its flaws and arguing that they should be fixed. I can't reasonably opt out of everything where I disagree with some aspect of it. Do you believe that politicians should vote against all bills that they disagree with any part of?
I think the wealthy in my country should pay more taxes than they currently do. I make more than the median income so this would probably result in me paying more taxes too. I can hold this view without donating part of my salary to the government. I'm against capital punishment. If I see someone committing a crime they could receive the death penalty for I'll still call the police. Do you believe that these views also make me a hypocrite?
A distinction without a practical difference. It's effectively impossible to buy food at the true cost. Therefore you don't think you should be allowed to buy food.
>If I see someone committing a crime they could receive the death penalty for I'll still call the police. Do you believe that these views also make me a hypocrite?
Yes. If you narc someone out to a system that metes out the death penalty and you disagree with it, then you're no better than the executors.
>I think the wealthy in my country should pay more taxes than they currently do. I make more than the median income so this would probably result in me paying more taxes too. I can hold this view without donating part of my salary to the government
Yes this is highly hypocritical. You want to demand others do something at gun-point that you won't even do voluntarily.
It’s like dude… this isn’t some secret loophole to getting to park somewhere that’s not allowed because another place is inconvenient.
You realize some people have to warm up vehicles on extremely cold days by letting them idle for 5-15 minutes. How are they supposed to accomplish this now?
Article has a js paywall so I'm unable to read if there is an exception.
It sounds a lot like you have a problem with your vehicle and should deal with it.
This ignores every laborer that requires heavy tools to complete their daily task. The people that keep your buildings and homes comfortable, for example, can easily have hundreds of pounds of tools.
So who, really, is the common man?
It takes a serious disconnect from reality to make the statement 'There's no reason that anyone should need to use a personal car for commuting inside urban areas.' Either someone remarkably rich or naive.
Steve the Office Manager doesn't need a 2.5 ton pickup truck with a 6-foot-tall frontend that needs a forward-facing camera because the visibility is so shit that there's no way to avoid splattering all of the children on the 2 mile trip through populated neighborhoods between his house and office.
And yes, Steve is a representative buyer of big trucks these days. Actual working professionals want to be able to actually see where they're going, so they buy vehicles with short frontends and high capacity, like the Ford Transit.
A Edwards poll of Pickup owners in 2018 showed that 75% have never hauled anything, and 70% use the bed less than once a year (ie, never). The sales numbers bear this out as well, pickups with actual usable bed space are very unpopular, almost all the units that are sold have crew cabs, with about as much room in the back for hauling as a minivan with the bench down.
Another case of complete disconnect from reality. Many tradesmen use their own personal vehicles. If you want to call it a 'company car' because the commute involves transport of professional tools, then go ahead and play that semantic game.
>And yes, Steve is a representative buyer of big trucks these days. Actual working professionals want to be able to actually see where they're going, so they buy vehicles with short frontends and high capacity, like the Ford Transit.
Something you're so intimately familiar with, that you totally overlooked that there actually are reasons 'anyone should need to use a personal car for commuting inside urban areas.'
>Steve the Office Manager doesn't need a 2.5 ton pickup truck with a 6-foot-tall frontend that needs a forward-facing camera because the visibility is so shit that there's no way to avoid splattering all of the children on the 2 mile trip through populated neighborhoods between his house and office.
And you probably don't need to have your heat set past 50 degrees in winter or 90 degrees in summer, but I bet you use more energy than you need, helping destroy the environment and kill off animals. You don't need to buy lots of things, but won't someone THINK of the splattered CHILDREN!!!
>A Edwards poll of Pickup owners in 2018 showed that 75% have never hauled anything, and 70% use the bed less than once a year (ie, never). The sales numbers bear this out as well, pickups with actual usable bed space are very unpopular, almost all the units that are sold have crew cabs, with about as much room in the back for hauling as a minivan with the bench down.
The change in pick-up trucks to be massive oversized behemoths including those with large cabs is the result of mental illness of those passing CAFE standards which made it effectively illegal to produce a small efficient truck.
A personally owned vehicle used to commute your tools to work could semantically call a 'professional vehicle' if you want to play games, but it's still commuting with your personal vehicle.
And at the end of the day, are you really willing to strip people of the freedom to drive through an urban area?
People who "just want to feel in control" are, essentially, externalising the cost of their choices while having better options available to them. There's not an upside for anyone.
Whereas people who need to drive, where work couldn't be done at all if they didn't, would actually be more efficient if they had clearer roads to get around on. It would save them fuel costs and time.
Really though, I sense that your argument isn't in good faith. A nuanced look at this can easily see that some activities in a city require a vehicle to add value, and others don't. Lumping the two together and citing freedom (to externalise the cost of your choices on to others) is a little like using tradespeople as human shields.
Yes, for exactly the same reason as I'm willing to strip people of the freedom to practice shooting at elementary schools.
The winter temperature extreme in NYC is around -16F, not idling until the engine block warms would be a problem for most vehicles.
Today they aren’t as popular as they used to be, modern cars usually have no problem starting anyway. And most people are lazy to plug a cable so instead use the cars built in pre-conditioner, which sadly also burns diesel and smells even worse than when combusted through the engine.
More modern cars can also utilize the EV charger for this purpose. Another reason why hybrid or EVs are superior to diesel in the city.
So, GTFO with your need to warm up your engine for half an hour.
https://www.currentresults.com/Yearly-Weather/USA/NY/New-Yor...
That is generally implied by the word 'extreme'.
>GTFO with your need to warm up your engine for half an hour.
Nobody said 30 minutes anywhere in this thread.
The rest was nice stories we told ourselves to not feel our butts freeze.
I learned a long time ago not to put the burden of this specific comfort (warm car in freezing winter) onto my neighborhood. But maybe that is just me being raised with values towards being a good citizen and a potential good ancestor for the next generations to come.
we're all entitled to freedom under the law, and some people depend on cars to make a living.
I say this is a car-less NYC resident, bounty hunting culture is dumb.
People are entitled to freedom under the law, but society is free to enact laws that make idling illegal, even if it means some people's vehicles won't start in winter, or restrict vehicle traffic on certain urban streets, whether this pertains to 18-wheelers or a regular handymans truck. Though I'm sure some people will claim there is a constitutional right to getting everywhere by car, and so society is actually not free to do that.
Either way, I doubt there will be significant change. Car culture has a vice-like grip on society, there is no path whatsoever out of this particular local maximum. There may be gestures towards coexistence with other modes of transportation, but never at a significant cost to cars. And that just isn't enough.
state sponsored snitching is dumb
What you are talking about is not freedom. It is the opposite. It is egoism. You want to do as you please without (negativ) consequences for your actions.
Your freedom ends when it impairs the freedom of others. In this case the freedom not to be poisoned by your car's unnecessary (that is the important distinction here) exhaust fumes.
But yeah. Go on denigrating others by calling them entitled.
You argue (if one could call you polemic that) to be free of the (negative) consequences of your actions. Free to dump your externalities onto society and burden others with the fallout of you (unnecessary) actions.
That is not freedom my dear fellow.
"Externalities" is a useful economic concept but it's been hijacked by people who use it as "stop doing things I don't like".
If my comment woke you up last night, then I apologize for making it.
The main part of the engine that needs to be heated up when cold is the oil, so that the viscosity is low enough to allow it to flow to all the parts of the engine it needs to reach. Modern oils do not have any issues being viscous even when cold, just make sure you use the right oil for your vehicle & climate, and change it on schedule.
Diesel engines are usually physically bigger and the combustion temperature is lower than petrol, so it takes longer to heat up. The biggest issue with a diesel is actually starting it though, that's why in colder climates diesel vehicles usually have a Webasto or similar device to preheat the coolant for you which will make it easier to crank.
Of course there are exceptions to this advice if you live in extreme climates, but NYC is usually not that extreme.
This is a dangerous and slippery slope.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/china-encourages-citize...?
I'm aware. We need less of that, not more of it.
This is super lousy.
...is a contradiction in terms. People who report things to the responsible authorities rather than taking violent enforcement action themselves are engaging in exactly the behavior vigilanteism is defined in opposition to.
This is going to get ugly real fast. It creates division and disharmony in a community. No wonder people are getting angry about this.
Read history.
Irrelevant, because this isn't citizens policing each other. (Though, I will note in regard to your question that the alternative of having a distinct subculture separate from normal citizens that inevitably views themselves aligned against the citizenry policing the citizenry is far worse than citizens policing each other, but yet that's what we mostly do.)
> This is going to get ugly real fast. It creates division and disharmony in a community
Lawbreaking creates division and disharmony in a community.
> Read history.
I’ve read quite a bit of it; but I disagree with your implicit analysis, which attributes to a method of enforcement that most modern societies have chosen for some laws problems that stem not from that source but from the particular laws which certain repressive societies enforced using that and other methods.
that about sums up the problem for Americans and the world have in general.
I know that I'd probably get some tickets myself but my belief is that we'd be safer overall if more people obeyed the traffic laws and that they would obey them if they were likely to get caught.
Also, I don't need a cut of the fines.
> Because you have to stand there for multiple minutes recording. Truckers will learn how to spot them.
I wonder... can you record a three minute video of a New York Police Department patrol car? If so, who pays for it?
Taxpayers.
For example,
> “I go out thinking I’m going to get assaulted,” said Ernest Welde, 47, an environmental attorney. “I’ve had my bags stolen by truck drivers. I’ve been physically assaulted. I’ve had to call the police a couple of times.”
>Another man, Eric Eisenberg, had a similar experience across town last year. An Amazon driver and two colleagues noticed Mr. Eisenberg pointing his phone’s camera at their idling truck, knocked him to the ground and held him down, according to a lawsuit Mr. Eisenberg filed in January.
There has to be some way to make Amazon.com pay for the actions of people who are working for them even if they are technically a separate LLC. The situation won't improve unless the CXO and the board at Amazon.com not some mid level or low level manager, not some contractor goes to prison for these things.
We already have a terrible mayor. Even the last mayor said something to the effect of they don't care about people stopping on the bus lane if they are actively loading or unloading. I am sure the new mayor will continue this policy.
Across the river in Jersey City, I've seen even police patrol cars do not care about engine idling laws. These laws probably don't matter if you are in the middle of nowhere in Kansas City but they are absolutely essential in New York City area. We need more enforcement, not less.
If I had to go to court and pay a fine for a guest who put out the trash incorrectly -- no warning, straight a ticket -- I have exactly ZERO sympathy for these engine idlers. They must pay. I'd say while we are at it, make the fines increasingly larger and force these law breakers to go to court and make them waste progressively longer amount of time with the court system every time it happens as well.
I once had to deal with an asshole double parked on a two way street forcing all of the traffic behind him to drive on my side and block the other direction. Did not GAF despite truck parking being available at the end of the block.
My complaint about unlawful parking is with people who put reflective vests on their dashboards. This is blatant corruption and we should not tolerate it.
I think we need a similar photograph law about unlawful parking and if there is a reflective vest or NYPD paraphernalia visible in the car, the fine goes up 100x regardless of whether they are NYPD / NYC employee.
It's wonderful.
"In the movies I’ve seen people who try to get out of a traffic ticket by telling the police officer they made a donation to the policeman’s ball, but those were comedies. I had no idea that not only does this exist there are official cards. In fact, the police in New York are livid that the number of cards is being limited."
Will fining other people make you feel better about the way you were treated?
All the more reason for EVERYONE to do it.
I propose while we are at it, we don't try to guess what is a "Legally authorized emergency motor vehicles" and complain about NYPD cars that are idling anyway. They can't kill us all!
https://www1.nyc.gov/nycbusiness/description/idling-regulati...
The idea of people ratting on each other like this somehow does not inspire me. Doing it for free in egregious cases is ok in my book but the former in my view just plainly sucks.
Ratting on people is different. Sure if I see an actual crime (or at least what constitute one in my eyes) I'll report. But report for example my neighbor for building "illegal" shed - I think it'll hurt my inner integrity too much.
Similar, what we're talking about is an actual crime in NYC. It's illegal, full stop, to idle a commercial vehicle for more than 3 minutes. You might not want that to be the law, but that's a very difference stance vs. "it's not an actual crime."
Put it this way. I'll deal with it when I see it. For now this is too abstract for me. In any ways if they only do it because they get rat money I am not very fond of it.
>"Similar, what we're talking about is an actual crime in NYC"
And it is a crime to be gay in Barbados. So fucking what? If I was in jury I would go for nullification right away and fuck this law. I have my own moral compass and am trying to follow it in how I perceive other humans.
I am greatly in favor of allowing people to be rewarded for preserving the commons, whether that’s by helping police figure out who committed a felony, or by gathering evidence of ongoing traffic violations.
All things considered, this is about the best possible application of law enforcement: it's nonviolent, nonconfrontational, directly improves quality of life within the city, and pays everyone involved (including the city itself.)
If this proves to be an issue and not just a speculative problem, then let's empower drivers to report owners for malfeasance. Until then, I'm content to treat it as the hypothetical it is.
But more seriously, why don't they just roll out dedicated loading zones like every other city in the world? Especially in Manhattan?
The fines are levied through a judicial system similar to traffic tickets, so the check on these potential abuses is for the accused to offer evidence to the contrary. For example, if they were already fined for a violation occurring at a specific time that would be an excellent defense against a subsequent ticket.
14 people normal hours/normal weekdays are roughly 14*1800=25,200 hours/year.
The complaints, according to the article, are 12,000 per year.
That makes it roughly 2 hours/complaint.
At first sight it doesn't sound like the clerks are overworked.
Diesel emits other pollutants, these should be taxed appropriately as well.
P.S. Bang-bang refers to a valve that is always fully open or fully closed. I.e. it "bangs" into the stops. The math jargon would be a step function. Step functions make for very inefficient market incentives.
Still turn them off if you don't need it running. Most modern diesels 2004+ are way more efficient in this regard in consumer vehicles and modern diesel trucks are better than they used to be.
Not that the above is historical. Modern batteries are much better. Direct injection engines start almost as fast as gas engines these days.
Source: I own a modern turbo diesel and read the manual.
there are several sectors where non-state actors are deputized to enforce compliance of private citizens, for decades at least.
its more interesting to me that someone just noticed and cared enough to apply it to other areas of life, and that everyone else just noticed this method will have durable consensus in our constitutional framework.
so I guess... surprise?
That… doesn’t seem like a large number? It’s 1,000 per month. This could happen once a day and be four blocks away each time. I see multiple trucks parked and idling daily in the same few blocks of a residential area of Seattle. If this is some kind of money making scheme, sure seems like they’re being really lazy about it and leaving money on the table.
This isn't the only virtuous revenue stream that the city throws away: it's an open secret that parking violations are basically unenforced for companies, and that the city will happily agree to cents on the dollar once you've racked up a few thousand violations.
With this system, the offender will still keep the engine on even after someone has filmed them. Whereas a police officer asking them to turn it off would stop the offense on the spot.
Only way this will actually help with emissions is if it becomes wide spread and well known enough, to act as an efficient deterrent.
Here's an idea. How about the cops who do nothing other than ticket illegal parking, do this work as well.
It was really weird for me seeing people leaving their car engine running with air conditioning on whilst going shopping for 30 minutes
Should also enforce parking. Great app idea to sell to cities.
IDK maybe have to have two photos _ x _ minutes apart to show it's not just an uber eats for a few mins. photo ticket.
Funny and sad. Buses that take passengers to and from airplane inside (most) airports, buzz idle for hours. They can be off, they can be electrical, naah. Another case, Buses that idle on their end station.
Burn the damn fuel.
I assume that designation enables law enforcement to identify news media personnel and may also entitle them certain rights while reporting.
But does it also entitle them to the exclusive use of public parking spaces on city streets?
I travel past the CBS Studios on West 57th each morning and signs are posted all around the building indicating parking is for NYP Plates Only.
You have to wonder just who arranged that special break. And why. I mean, c'mon, can't Andy Rooney and his colleagues afford to park their cars in a garage? Just what have these people done to deserve a special public subsidy all their own? Sounds pretty generous to me.
But why stop there? Why not go ahead and name the whole street after Andy and the gang? 57th Street could become Sixty Minutes Street. Although that could get confusing. So maybe we should keep the 57th Street signs and just add a little name underneath like Sixty Minutes Way.
Someone said recently (when the city announced that 2 lanes of Broadway would be closed to traffic and turned into what? A MALL?) that under Mayor Bloomberg's administration New York City—all of it—is for sale. So with a huge revenue shortfall looming, why isn't NYC charging these people for all this privilege? Is it for lack of imagination? Or lack of parking spaces? Reply Quote VA Beltway Re: NYP Plates & Privileges August 07, 2008 08:12PM In my travels, only NY and NJ seems to have plates for the press.
And I wonder about physician and dentist plates. Reply Quote LG Re: NYP Plates & Privileges December 09, 2015 09:34AM This is a super weird article. NYC parking and traffic is incredibly difficult to navigate, so people who think it is important to society that reporters have access to newsworthy events without having to worry about being ticketed or towed decided to give them special license plates.
Depending on the administration in office, the rights those plates give them vary - under Bloomberg, they could only park in those NYP spots without getting ticketed; under other administrations, they've been able to double park or park on the sidewalk. The point of the NYP spaces near places where press vans often park is to give them a place to legally park without tying up traffic. Most of them are near places like the courthouses, the UN, Madison Square Garden where double-parking TV vans could cause a lot of traffic problems. It's maybe not an ideal solution, but I also can't think of a better one.
I mean, c'mon, can't Andy Rooney > and his colleagues afford to park their cars in a > garage? Just what have these people done to > deserve a special public subsidy all their own?
[dmv.ny.gov] The plates are for news gathering vehicles, like those big vans with the satellite dishes on the top, or the cars journalists drive to report from an off-site location. Andy Rooney might have talked himself into one so he can park near his office, but if he has, that's an abuse of the system, not a problem with the system itself.
> Someone said recently (when the city announced > that 2 lanes of Broadway would be closed to > traffic and turned into what? A MALL?)
...a public plaza with cafe tables and seating. There are two definitions for the word "mall." In this case, it's the one that means "a usually public area often set with shade trees and designed as a promenade or as a pedestrian walk." [www.merriam-webster.com]
> with a huge > revenue shortfall looming, why isn't NYC charging > these people for all this privilege?
They are. There is a charge both to obtain and renew a press plate: [dmv.ny.gov]
> under Mayor Bloomberg's administration New York > City—all of it—is for sale.
Under Mayor Bloomberg's administration, there was a huge crackdown on illegal parking, and since then, members of the press have only been allowed to park in the special designated spots. It's certainly not the case that Big Media somehow bribed the Bloomberg administration for special privileges. They are currently lobbying the DiBlasio administration to once again allow them immunity from ticketing when parked in ways that would otherwise be illegal, but that doesn't seem to be your concern.
All this took me about two minutes of googling to figure out. Try it yourself next time.
Sincerely, A New Yorker Reply Quote Agnes C Re: NYP Plates & Privileges January 30, 2017 08:31AM NYP plates are abused everywhere in the city. An inquirer was correct: What should these people have free parking at work? And even if they are out, "gathering a story," they are more often than not in a news mobile with cameras, etc.
NYP 5838 has been abusing parking in my area all the time - always overnight. Really? So why should they get a garage. Who wouldn't like to have overnight parking and not get a ticket or towed in the morning? This is a real abuse. Another one if the DDS plates - dentist on housecalls? Are you serious. Reply Quote Newer Topic Older Topic Print View RSS A word you have used in your post has been banned from use. Please use a different word or contact the forum administrators.
Those jerks will park next to a playground while their diesel fumes blanket the area.
[0] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323426#causes
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4390771/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/car-fu...
https://phys.org/news/2019-02-pollution-deaths-linked-diesel...
https://www.catf.us/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/CATF_Pub_Dies...
https://www.hazards.org/chemicals/fuming.htm
That last article itself cites 15 sources. The data shows significantly more deaths from diesel than asbestos and roughly or par with lead. Remember that those exposures last a lifetime, so the data lags significantly.
Not saying it's not bad, but this equivocation is just not accurate in my view. More deaths sure - because more people were exposed. Can you honestly tell me you would rather be exposed to asbestos or lead (no ppe)? Also, emissions controls have increased as has air quality since the 80s. I doubt this idea that the data still has lag left in it. We would expect to see the most impact at the higher exposure levels.
Obviously you personally would rather not be exposed to asbestos or lead but at the societal level 1000 people that are really really dead and 1000 people who are just normally dead aren’t that different. And honestly it’s worse for diesel having wide exposure because there are in between states between totally fine and dead and those affect more people.
We all know that car accidents are one of the top killers in the world, yet we don't ban cars outright. But that's because absolute numbers are big simply because billions of people drive cars: on a per-trip basis, they are actually not that bad.
The question was not which dosages of which chemicals would be more harmful for a short term exposure. That’s not relevant to answering the above question. In fact it likely has a different answer.
(For lag I’m referring to the lead/asbestos data. Exposure to these has been on the decline for decades but we’re still seeing deaths due to exposures 40 years ago), so they presumably cause an outsize number of deaths per year currently).
If you mean by perception only, then sure. These three things have existed together for a long time. If you eliminate the two more dangerous ones, then the remaining less dangerous/acute one will be next in priority and get the attention.
Again, tell me you'd rather be exposed to lead or asbestos.
In any case, under normal conditions, nobody is going to choose realilistic exposure levels of lead or asbestos over ambient diesel fumes.
There are plenty of events in history where stale air in a city along with significant pollution killed tens of thousands of people over a short period, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smog_of_London.
But taking it to a philosophical level, what framework gives one the right to pollute? In my view, the opposite is true. Clearly, if a factory dumps toxic waste on your property, they are violating your property rights. I don’t believe anyone should have the right to pollute, based on the simple fact that any polluter violates another’s property. Our society of course isn’t quite there, but I believe we are sacrificing a rights by allowing pollution (even from ourselves), rather than the other way around (polluters having a right to pollute.)
But do you, for instance, run a Wifi access point at home? Do you use a cell phone? And you surely know how radios work: electromagnetic waves. To use your phrasing, "what intuition leads to anyone thinking that electromagnetic radiation is safe in large quantities?"
While we know something of electromagnetic radiation effects on health, we know almost nothing regarding long term effects of the type that have become our daily environment, because this level of exposure (wifi APs, cell phones) is a very recent phenomenon.
But, we could find out in the long run that they have a non-negligible effect on a part of the population that it may end up being classified as "pollution" in the future too.
The point is that people disagree on what are "large quantities" with exhaust gasses (even different governments do, which is why there are different standards), or where do we draw the line. Going with the extreme example can actually be counterproductive because it can easily be proven irrelevant.
The other problem with air pollution from cars is that it's conflated with global warming today (not saying it's not an issue, just that everyone wants to solve both problems at once). One can easily solve for one problem without solving for another (eg. allow only use of clean vehicles during peak hours as a pretty light restriction, to banning non-clean vehicles only in dense urban areas as a pretty strong one).
It can run off of a battery bank or the built in accumulator. Well insulated fridges are pretty efficient
Anyway basically there was no power at the festivals, it was usually just a parking lot at a local highschool, so they'd plug it in overnight. Not sure whether they had batteries/etc, but they were perfectly fine being out in a hot parking lot for 16 hours, no problem. And we were constantly in and out of the trucks selling ice cream which is not what a delivery truck was designed for.
These days it's the local taxi companies they have their teeth into, so I'm told.
Not only because it makes you miserable but also because there's always a risk when you start calling law enforcement on people.
I've vended ice cream from a bike
Ten minutes later, police appeared and arrested the driver.
The council wrote back and said the driver was trading illegally, and had been warned before.
(My colleagues made jokes about this for months.)
I texted several of my neighbors once. Completely polite and to the point “hey, there are dogs barking all day lately. Can you double check yours isn’t one? It’s really disruptive. Thanks!”
One of them passive aggressively never spoke to me again until they moved. The other texted me back berating me. How dare I even suggest their perfect dog…
I will call the cops anonymously from now on.
This is the reason ice cream trucks in my area only take cash. I haven’t seen a legitimately licensed ice cream truck in many years.
This is why there is such a disconnect between people who live in the rest of the USA and those who live in a few select cities on the coasts. For those who live in the bubble and wonder “Why don’t people identify with my political views” this is a great example.
I guess you and the rest of the upset heartland commoners can subscribe to “New York Crime, Garbage, Inequality, and Theft Weekly” if other content bugs you so badly.
Maybe people should realize that everybody spying and reporting their neighbor is a dark road, more in line with the Gestapo and Eastern Bloc countries than the freedom we claim to love in America.
We complain about police states and lack of training/oversight, yet we want to turn everyone into this police function and with no training?
That's exactly what they're doing with this fumes law.
Many summary offense crimes have fines and/or a few days in jail as the punishment. The courts usually give the fine without jail in most cases. These are things like driving infractions, noise complaints, minor graffiti, leaving your car idle (separate from the commercial law), jaywalking, etc.
But if they are making all this money, why not expand the courts and hire more meter maids to do this work? As you bring up, they would likely be better suited to collet the evidence and it sounds like the courts can't handle the citation volume at the current levels.
Wrt to wealth inequality, yes that's definitely a more important issue but also one that is completely orthogonal to car idling and cities can work on more than one thing at a time.
It's in the New York section of the paper. That's the part of the paper that New Yorkers read to keep abreast of the city's happenings, including smaller human stories like this one. Thinking about it as "advertising space" is completely flipped: ads are worthless if nobody reads your paper, and stories like this do an excellent job of bringing readers in.
Put another way: you wouldn't bat an eye at a home-style cooking story in the Cooking section. Why are you surprised by a similar level of provincial interest in the local section?
No it doesn't. NYC has some of the lowest crime rates in the nation. Here is deaths per capita from interpersonal violence (aka homicide) circa 2014. You can view as far back as 1980. NYC crime rates dipped below the national average in 1995 and have only gotten lower since.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/mortality-rates-united-...
Bronx: 9.2 per 100k Queens: 3.5 per 100k Kings county (Brooklyn): 6.5 per 100k New York county (Manhattan): 3.3 per 100k Richmond county (Staten Island): 4.1 per 100k
The 7 major felonies have gone done year after year for every year since the mid 90s.
https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Giuliani...
Your right about the disconnect between those on the coast and those outside, because you're obviously disconnected from the real on-the-ground situation in New York. "Why don't people identify with my political views", because some people identify with the version of reality editorialized on TV, and thus smugly berate us over the problems we don't actually have.