Single Fire Hydrant Nets NYC $33,000 a Year
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When the goal becomes to cause the behaviour more often so that your can collect more fines, the entire system is just fundamentally broken.
A large portion of the money collected should go to a department whose goal is to find further ways to discourage the problematic behaviour. Paint the curb bright red, for starters.
It shows how the city updated the paint marks for 2 of those illegal parking spots after they were made aware of the issue.
Apparently it worked to get the Soviet diplomats to stop parking in front of hydrants.
Although not in love with fire hydrants as a revenue source either.
Remember the truck has a couple of minutes supply of water onboard, so hooking up to a hydrant immediately isn't the top priority anyways.
Fun. Then we get kids putting a cardboard box over the hydrant and playing "what box?" after smashing your windows.
Varies by municipality: when parking anywhere, look for blue reflectors in the middle of the road. There's usually one or two per street. They denote where the fire hydrants are so the FD can easily find them when cars block curbside visibility. You can use the same feature to avoid hidden hydrants yourself.
In marching band, we referred to those as Smurf Shit, and the drum captain would whack the snare a particular way to let the rest of the band know of its presence so nobody tripped over it
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/work-van-full-debris-its-way...
Hydraulic cutters are slow AF and they're not going to remove bulk material that is in the way.
That would still not really align incentives. If a particular action (parking next to a fire hydrant) produced revenue for that department, they will be financially incentivized to encourage more of that action, not less of it.
If the government somehow lost money rather than gained money when someone did something naughty, then maybe they'd work to try to reduce that naughty behavior.
A DDA study determined that 43% of visitors were being fined.
As a result of getting ticketed, I've heard many people in say they won't visit [redacted] anymore.
So I guess that's one way to discentivize yourself.
Your assumption is that fines discourage. If fines discourage, and the goal is to maximize discouragement, that will occur when fines are maximized.
...unless you think the fines are so large that we've gone past the peak discouragement point, where people are so scared of the fines that they no longer maximize their misbehavior. In this case, if we decrease fines, revenue to the city will increase! the Laffer parking curve!
The beatings will stop when morale improves.
The best solution (and, no, I'm not joking) would be destroy all funds raised in government fines, nationwide. Send the fines directly to the Federal Reserve balance sheet.
Fines generally suck anyway, because they allow people that can easily afford them to break the law.
Using fines as a "revenue source" introduces so many perverse incentives into the system that it automatically becomes corrupt.
See: the incestuous relationships between the towing/repossession companies and the police.
Fines are good as deterrent. Fines should always go back to the public--they should never become state revenue. This breaks the incentives.
The supply of community service hours is decentralized and 501(c)(3) organizations have limited input into law enforcement, so the government has less incentive to increase non-compliance to increase citations.
Also fun to see the entire C-suite of a company get 1000 hours of community service each instead of a fine paid by shareholders whose only mistake was hiring them.
I can form a 501c3 today, and as long as it doesn't funnel earnings to an individual (other than a very lavish salary) I could let people 'donate' their time at one of my community service parties, pay me a small fee, and issue a small donation to some local cause.
Then how will they be able to milk the citizens for millions a year? It's in their best interest to keep everything as confusing as possible so they can trap as many people as they can.
A friend of mine who had been a reporter for the NYT told me it was official policy that all reporters' parking fines would be paid by the newspaper if there wasn't a free space anywhere otherwise -- to never miss a story because of parking.
So that doesn't surprise me at all.
EDIT: see my response below, I forgot it was a general rule but I think fire hydrants were an exception because of safety. So probably not applying here at all, sorry
Similarly, I know several plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs etc. who consider what I see as eye watering stacks of parking tickets to be just an ordinary cost of doing business in NYC.
Parking fines become a cost of doing business because there are no practical alternatives.
A great solution to this sort of thing is common in the rest of the world, pedestrian-first streets that are permeable to vehicular traffic, offer unstructured temporary parking for necessary uses but does not offer structured overnight street parking for individuals and have a ~15mph limit. Perfect for getting the plumber's van to the front door of properties on such a street.
Here's a random example in Innsbruck, Austria, note how much room there is to park contractor vans in front of the various adjacent buildings: https://maps.app.goo.gl/m2e7AmWFr8hqw9BC9?g_st=ic
Now, that street is at the maximalist end of this idea, on most NYC streets you could delete maybe 25% of the street parking for individuals and there'd be plenty of room for plumbers. Also for garbage collection units (to address the rat problem), bicycle parking, al fresco dining, etc.
The urbanist philosophy you are denigrating isn't that cars are 'bad.' The idea is that they're fine in many contexts, they're just wildly inefficient when being used by too many individual persons in a dense urban environment, such as most of NYC.
I would also add along these lines - the changes you perceive as purely punitive to drivers probably make life better for everyone in the city, with a cost to only (some) drivers. Something to think about.
Not exactly. If the speed limit is so low and the path is full of pedestrians, getting there will take a lot longer. Then you're paying a skilled worker to spend more time driving and less time working, on the way in and the way out, to each job multiple times a day.
Not parking in a parking structure several blocks away isn't infeasible because it's physically impossible to put a job box on wheels and lug it down the street, it's infeasible because you can't get it there in a timely manner, which is exactly what this hasn't solved.
And you have a nice idyllic picture of the lone van, but in practice a city block full of skyscrapers will have plumbers and electricians and HVAC technicians and IT staff carrying in computers and things, delivery trucks for everything from packages of dog food and copier paper to appliances to restocking convenience stores and vending machines.
That's what the parking spaces are for, and they're already scarce before you remove any.
Also, the plumber won't always be making calls to pedestrian superpaths. Keep in mind how I pointed out that a wide 15mph pedestrian superhighway as described is a maximalist idea - but there are many equally maximalist auto superhighways in the city aren't there? (A key difference being no one wants to live near those) In much the same way as smaller auto roads are more permeable to peds than superhighways, smaller ped oriented roads can be more auto-permeable, with say a 25mph limit and limited street parking. This should constitute the bulk of the city. Then finally at the other end of the scale you have the 35mph avenue/boulevard, then the 45mph auto road, then the 65mph superhighway. They can all live in harmony servicing different kinds of traffic at different speeds, a diverse set of path weights creating beautiful overlays of separate cycle, pedestrian, and road traffic networks, something the Netherlands is really good at in particular.
New York is not all skyscrapers - sort of the opposite actually by land area and population. (Approximately 78 percent of New Yorkers do not live in Manhattan) I live in a part of Brooklyn, where there is certifiably plenty of street parking, I never have trouble finding a spot in front of my place. There's a street nearby maybe 5 minutes walk away where I park when I'm pulling a trailer because there's always enough room for it. That street is where tractor trailers park with 53 foot trailers too - if multiple 53 foot trailers can legally park next to my vehicle with a jet ski on a trailer, next to a public park, that is not a scarcity of parking in my eyes. Keep in mind it is these kinds of predominantly residential medium density places, where most people live, where I want to delete parking spaces. Skyscrapers are just not relevant to the urban environment where most people live in NYC. For example it's perhaps a 40 minute walk to the nearest skyscrapers for me, and I'm not even that far out into Brooklyn.
In Manhattan where the very tallest skyscrapers are? That's a whole other ballgame of scale, I agree. It's just the top of the density pyramid of the overall city though and thus occupies a relatively small overall area of it -- I don't think our citywide urbanist strategies should revolve solely around this area - it requires distinct strategies for the absolutely densest core to keep things moving. It should all just be commercial parking only basically. That's hard to actually enforce in practice, so I think the best strategy is to do a congestion charge set at the right level to reduce the number of single occupant commuter type vehicles in the area and correctly price in that cost of doing business in the densest part of the urban core as a charge rather than a fine. As a bonus traffic should improve as well - I'm eager to see what the upcoming lower Manhattan congestion charge pilot does for my blood pressure when crossing Manhattan in a vehicle using Canal street.
I don't know about that. Most city highways in the US have a speed limit of 50-55 MPH or less. It's certainly possible to construct roads that allow for higher speeds. Germany has many highways with no formal speed limit and a limit by gentleman's agreement of around triple that.
No one wants to have that literally in their front yard, but many people find it convenient to live within a few blocks of it, and the directly adjacent land is suitable for things like industry and warehouses and high voltage lines and railways, which all have to be somewhere.
> if multiple 53 foot trailers can legally park next to my vehicle with a jet ski on a trailer, next to a public park, that is not a scarcity of parking in my eyes.
Neither is that the place where contractors are racking up parking tickets.
> It should all just be commercial parking only basically.
That doesn't quite work though, does it? Suppose you live there and you're taking home a new kitchen sink from the hardware store, or literally any other heavy object you have to get from wherever it is now to your residence or vice versa. It's not about whether the vehicle is a truck, it's about whether what's in it is too much to carry long distances on foot.
> I think the best strategy is to do a congestion charge
Which then itself becomes a cost of doing business for anyone who can't avoid it, so it gets priced into the cost of trade services etc. even when the customer isn't rich.
Socially it's always better to reduce scarcity than extract rents from it.
> pedestrian superpaths
The reason there is resistance to this is that cars are heavy, so the best place for them is on the ground where you don't need expensive structural support. Whereas pedestrians are light, so you can build pedestrian spaces vertically at much lower expense. Which means there is much more constraint on the space that can be allocated to cars, whereas if you want more space for pedestrians, you can build taller buildings. Which in turn means it makes sense to use the ground level space for the things that it costs more to put higher up.
And if you want pedestrian spaces outside, put them above the road. Build balconies that overhang the street with pedestrian bridges to other buildings at the level of the second story. Have your al fresco dining on the roof -- the view is better from there anyway.
If not, seems very unethical -> see fire, park in front of hydrant to get the story, impede fire department fighting the fire
"The annualized total of all Fire Hydrant parking fines? $55 million."
Not sure how much of $11B NYPD budget is allocated for parking fine enforcement, but I suppose $55 million will more than cover it.
The NYPD notoriously not only refuses to enforce most parking violations, but is actually the largest source of illegal parking violations themselves. There's even an official card for it[0]. This has been a known and documented problem for years, but the NYPD has successfully resisted any attempt at oversight.
It's one of the reasons that the new law against idling allows citizens to report it themselves without requiring a cop to issue a ticket.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/nypd-courtesy-card-police-miscond...
At this point, I don't know if that's such a safe bet when you find governments managing to spend millions on a single toilet, lol. I agree though, they're probably making revenue. If its 300 ppl and they're on average making $75k (made up figures) that's roughly 22 million right there.
I wonder how much _all_ parking fines bring in. If fire hydrants alone are $50 that number has to be massive, right?
(I don't mean that it's a sufficient cause for a given cop becoming corrupt. Just cases where it was the deciding factor.)
My favorites for the first type is a deputy fire chief from a Long Island volunteer department who works construction and just double parks the department SUV in front of the site.
I couldn't do it because getting slapped with a fine would cause an anxiety flare-up even when I knew the consequences beforehand. (And also I have worse luck than other people and can prove it with math!)
However, I did pull a similar stunt in lower Manhattan for awhile too, though I moved my bike on street cleaning days- though to another illegal spot by my office building- at that point I was living in Battery Park and my office was right off the west side highway in Tribeca, and I never had a single issue doing that.
Great way of attracting attention to yourself.
Currently there's construction there so probably the fines are reduced.
Edit: Actually looks like they repainted the lines there in between Aug 2013 and Oct 2014 which makes it much more clear.
Here's 2013: https://goo.gl/maps/NF3xguY2P6FX4JUX7 And 2014: https://goo.gl/maps/Bk6W8bqndCb1Zjvd7
The whole thing smells of someone sticking to the letter not the spirit of the law.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-firefighters-need-15-feet-of-sp...
$33K per year in 2013 is just a tax on idiots.
Its kind of a wager, will I pay more in fines or parking garage fees.
For a lot of delivery businesses, its really part of their business model. They know they're getting X amount of fines per month; they bake that into their costs.
Were I'm coming from: When a problem keeps happening over and over and over again because it's next to impossible to train 100% of the population to follow every rule to the letter, you work around the problem using design and technology. You don't use fines to create a revenue source.
The solution is easy, get rid of on street parking, use the space for pedestrians, bikes and shops, cafes and restaurants. Why should the public pay for people's ability to put their space wasters somewhere and they even complain about getting fines for obstructing emergency services.
Before someone chimes in with "but you need a car to get around...", we are talking about Manhattan here not somewhere in the Apalachians.
I can see being in a hurry and not realizing that you can't park here. Definitely scammy.
-block you from renewing vehicle registration (if registered in NY, not sure about other states)
-incapacitate your vehicle with a boot
-tow your vehicle
The only time you could maybe get away with tossing the ticket is if you visit NY from another state in a non rental vehicle and do not plan to return. This is going to be a low percentage of vehicles.
In NYC, parking tickets cost $45-125. Fire hydrant violations are at the upper end of that range. But when garage parking is $10-20 an hour, rolling the dice on the fine is the economically rational behavior. Yes, this is sociopathic when you apply it to fire hydrants, but NYC drivers are sociopaths.
They ought to add a zero to all those fines and start heavily using the carrot to discourage driving. But the thing is, the city quite likes the status quo. If those fines were more of a deterrent, the city would get less revenue. The fines need to be low enough not to actually discourage the antisocial behavior. Isn’t neoliberalism awesome?