(Compare the city’s historic problems around preventing illegal de-stabilization of rental units, inability to prevent the NYPD from parking on sidewalks, and so forth.)
This is why the sidewalks next to city parks take forever to get shoveled after a big snow storm.
It only works for idling trucks because the person letting the truck idle is almost never the owner and the person idling the truck is usually doing work so they're not around to notice they're being reported and there's a lot more public apetite for enforcement against businesses than the general public and they write it off as a cost of doing business.
If you open up the floodgates of anyone v anyone that generic parking enforcement entails I give it about a week before some "super reporter" gets curb stomped by an uber driver who's having a bad day. And then you'll have public scrutiny, the tough question that come with that and the entire program is likely to be walked back as a result.
For consumer-corporate disputes, learning to leverage New York's regulatory state is a bit of a superpower. Basically, sending in a written complaint with the regulator copied and then having them open a regulatory-investigatory file is real leverage because even if you're full of shit, it's going to burn legal dollars on the other side. That, in turn, makes a letter to the company threatening regulatory escalation as the next step land seriously.
Assuming that you pay with a credit card, I would assume you could dispute the charge on the basis that they're violating the law and win any faceoff immediately on that basis.
The example of a yearly subscription paid monthly should make this obvious. You can't exit this arrangement after 6 months and expect to simply not pay the remaining 6 months, as the contract was for a whole year. All this law does is force the business to make it easy for you to cancel any auto-renew for a second year. But if the business doesn't do that and you dispute a payment, how hard do you expect your bank to work to figure out if this payment was for a part of the original contract, or for an auto-renewal you should have been able to easily canceled, but haven't?
My point would be that the argument would be clear. It stands to reason that a business cannot consider an unlawfully collected payment to be legitimate. If you can demonstrate that you attempted to give them notice of cancellation and they ignored it unlawfully, then that's your justification that the payment wasn't authorized. You can, of course, revoke authorization to collect payment anytime you want.
This is a really common kind of dispute that businesses have with credit card users. Typically, their response is that the user did, in fact, authorize it because they agreed to a variety of terms that mandated this and that for cancellation, and so on and so forth. In essence, if they can get the user to admit that they gave the original authorization, their argument would be that it was never withdrawn because the user previously agreed to some T&C buried definition of how cancellation would be defined.
The counter to that, of course, now, is new, which is to say that those terms are unlawful and thus negated. It seems completely sound to me as a strategy.
However, if a business fails to do so, and the only way they have to cancel your subscription is via, say, a notarized letter, I don't see how you can convince your bank that you tried to unsubscribe unless you have sent such a notarized letter.
Typically, the way it would work is that they would say, "You authorized it," and you would say, "Actually, I didn't authorize that payment. I only authorized the prior payments. I never authorized the subsequent ones because I logged in to their site and attempted to cancel, but they did not provide me with a means to do so."
To which they could say no your initial authorization should also apply to these subsequent charges because that cancellation method is not one we accept. In the past, that defense could work. Your NEW counterargument would be: Sorry, but they cannot rely on and profit from unlawful behavior.
The contract as you signed it might well contain a clause that explicitly says you have to perform arcane rituals to stop the subscription: now you have to have the bank analyze the law in your place of residence on whether the contract itself might be illegal. I do not live in the USA and don't have experience with the credit card dispute system, but I personally doubt that this level of legal analysis would be performed by the bank for your, free of charge even.
I have no doubt that you would win this in court, by the way.
Obviously.
What needs to happen for rules like this is: 1. the complaint should be easy/automatic to validate and rule on, 2. hard for the company to appeal and stonewall, and 3. the fine money should go to the person who filed the complaint as a bounty to motivate people to look for violators.
(It's worth noting that the city does sometimes enforce new regulations well, and in a way that the public is aware of. For example, businesses in the city are required to accept hard cash as payment, and the penalties for not doing so can be significant. Friends have told me that the city is very proactive about responding to those complaints. Anecdotally, the city has also become much better about responding to some forms of illegal parking and idling over the past few years. It certainly helps when the incentives are aligned, i.e. the cost of the enforcement program is supported by the fines collected.)
Failing to provide salary transparency in job postings is another common one with zero enforcement.