New York City is owed $500m in parking fines. No one is paying up | Hacker News Reader

New York City is owed $500m in parking fines. No one is paying up

theguardian.com

21 pointshappyopossum17 comments

Where I live, if you don't pay up, you can't renew your license. So at most, you get away with it for a few years. By that time, the fine has increased considerably, and you can't drive until you pay it and then renew your license.

Likewise if you have to go to traffic court with a previous long outstanding fine, it's heavily used against you. This impacts the heck out of your insurance, because you are then classified as a habitually risky driver.

Also, if your car is towed for any reason, which costs hefty money for every day in the compound, you cannot retrieve it until outstanding fines are paid. The longer you take, the more expensive it gets.

So people generally pay up. On time, even. You can always fight it in court and sometimes get it dropped, or at least lowered to a lesser offense.

Yes. I haven't had a parking ticket in a while, but in Maryland I had to pay a city parking ticket before I could renew my license. Ticketing and fine collection are quite efficient in the Washington, DC, area, and I'm surprised to hear that NYC is not at least as efficient.

Sounds like they pay up, unless it gets too high and then they aren't able to. I'm guessing these fines are accumulated over a few people who are heavily fined and who don't care

Why doesn't the city tow or otherwise impound the bad-actor vehicles?

Then if the owner doesn't rectify the penalties, auction the property off.

A lot of them are from out of state or country, and presumably NYC can't pursue as many people now that they've cut down the size and efficacy of the police force

> and presumably NYC can't pursue as many people now that they've cut down the size and efficacy of the police force

Source? NY has the highest number of police per capita in the US. And from their own stats [0] they're only expecting a tiny increase in uniform officers in 2022 vs 2021 (+23) after a slightly larger dip from 2020 to 2021 (-551, out of 36,461).

The only ones who have cut the "efficacy" of the police force is the police force themselves with their bullshit "go slow"/"work stops"/"slowdown". Not to mention this isn't even an issue the police should be handling. Your comment makes no sense.

Had you read the article you would have seen:

> Police often turn a blind eye, amid allegations that they illegally park their personal cars and harassed a cyclist who reported them.

So the police are already busy not doing their jobs (surprise!)

> But a significant amount of illegal parking by wealthy operators is officially sanctioned – and even subsidized. Under a controversial New York City policy called the stipulated fine program, corporations among the city’s biggest parking offenders may prepay their tickets for a hefty discount, if they agree not to contest the fines.

And they are not only fine with it but they give discounts to the corporations. It's just the the cost of doing business.

Honestly this is a pretty bad article focusing entirely too much on silly weed trucks while hiding the more obscene practices (not ticketing and giving discounts) deeper in the article. Even going as far as to call out the fact the weed trucks aren't even selling gummies, which has what to do with parking fines?

[0] https://council.nyc.gov/budget/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2...

I link it later when I'm not at work but there was a really interesting report about how after the BLM protests, police departments were basically told to not pursue minor violations as frequently and violent crime skyrocketed because instead of being pulled over for a traffic violation a criminal wouldn't get caught or put in jail until they killed someone. NYC was a big offender of this

This article is about parking tickets. Do you have a source that the NYPD were told to issue fewer parking tickets? Or...any source at all?

What major city didn't see a spike in crime during the pandemic in 2020? 1 in 6 NYPD officers was sick during this period, some precincts lost a third of their force for a while.

Crime is now dropping, is it because the police were told to do their jobs again?

> instead of being pulled over for a traffic violation a criminal wouldn't get caught...until they killed someone

This talking point was stale in 2020 but I've never heard it put so unconvincingly

The biggest cut was overtime reduction. NYPD is notorious for going over its OT budget: https://cbcny.org/research/overboard-ot

Other biggest cuts were moving crossing guards and school safety agents from NYPD to DOE. How does that affect parking enforcement?

https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/487-20/in-face...

Ironically, they added 165 Traffic Enforcement Agents, the closest line item related to parking. This resulted in a net gain of $42 million for the NYPD.

So, by your logic, now NYC CAN pursue MORE people now that they've INCREASED the size of the traffic enforcement police force?

Well first off, they do boot and impound liberally for multiple unpaid fines in addition to the usual denial of registration/license renewal for unpaid fines (though TFA says the latter changed recently but recent enough that it shouldn't have impacted the backlog of unpaid fines).

Second, 500m is $25 for every person in the greater NY area. That doesn't pass the sniff test. It would be irresponsible and stupid to go off half cocked over that kind of data. I suspect that the bulk of these fines are from systemic edge cases that have piled up over the years (the article implies up to 20yr). The knee jerk jackboot move you suggested is unlikely to be appropriate here.

Tickets can be $200. People can leave their car and keep getting tickets. They could accumulated thousands of dollars in no time. Adding to that is the huge number of diplomats and other non-citizens who get ticketed and ignore them with impunity.

However I agree a large % is probably not recoverable at all.

crumbs, Naples (italy), a city of 1M (55b$ GDP metropolitan area,3M people,2019), is out the money of 5B euros at FY 2021 [0], of wich 3.9B+ of unpaid taxes, fines,rents or other credits. only 17% of people pay road fines and 52% pay garbage collection contribution[1]. debt is equivalemt to 5 years of fiscal income

[0]https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/napoli-via-patto-draghi-risa...

[1]https://napoli.repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/05/28/news/scheda_...

Not surprised, Naples is quaint but also quite dumpy, especially compared to the rest of Italy. Overall Italy and Spain are tons of fun but also full of thieves and sketchy people who prey on tourists and rip them off or steal from then. Definitely not safe compared to places like USA, Canada, or Australia.

Parking is absurd. Public spaces should have free parking

Respectfully disagree. Maybe in less-populated areas, but nowhere near Manhattan. The able-bodied can get anywhere on the train, taxis are abundant, cars are a luxury, and congestion is such a problem the city is seriously weighing a $23 fee just to drive into Manhattan.

Want to park your private property? Pay for private parking.

We can have both and be better off. Permit parking for residents and free parking for public spaces. NYC has plenty of room for cars to park half on the sidewalk as well like they do in European cities with tights streets. This would increase parking capacity almost two fold compared to parallel parking.

Parking at all is a problem for public spaces, since a parking spot can only host a single car at a time. The park can host much more people than it can fit parking spaces, so it's better to use that road space for something higher density than single occupancy cars

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