Photo Courtesy of Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
A digital system featuring stickers and scanable license plates will replace the oft-abused parking placards by 2021.
By Forum Staff
A digital parking management system featuring stickers and scanable license plates will replace the oft-abused placards by 2021, Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged on Thursday.
The mayor indicated that his administration aims to phase out the use of physical City-issued placards throughout NYC in 2021 and eliminate the use of fraudulent placards. This will be accomplished, de Blasio said, with an increase in penalties, a strict three-strike policy for misusing a placard, culminating in revocation, and a dedicated Department of Transportation placard enforcement unit. At the same time, a new census of placard misuse will provide data to measure progress and inform the public, Hizzoner noted.
According to the administration, the DOT is currently conducting a pilot program that replaces paper placards with window stickers on 300 DOT-owned vehicles. By making it impossible to move an official placard to a different vehicle, the sticker program will eliminate a significant aspect of placard misuse. Replacing placards with stickers is also a stepping stone towards a fully virtual permit system, and this sticker system will provide a bridge until the pay-by-plate system is fully implemented.
The DOT and City police Department also will roll out a state-of-the-art parking management system, the administration promised. An integrated parking management system will eventually link parking meters, hand-held enforcement devices and license plates. Government employees that have authorization to park at certain places and times, which are currently identified with a parking placard, will have those stipulations attached to a license plate that will automatically register as legally or illegally parked—eliminating discretion and confusion in placard enforcement. It will cost $52 million for installation and new equipment, and the first edition of the system, focused on pay-by-plate meters, will be fully operational by 2021.
Additionally, through DOT and Department of Finance rulemaking, the City will create a three-strike policy that will lead to permanent revocation for misusing an official placard three times. This rule would make misuse or fraudulent use an additional, separate violation on top of a parking violation. This rule will be in place by spring of 2019. De Blasio said that he will also advocate for changes to State law to raise the penalty for a placard violation from $50 to $250.
The City Department of Transportation will create a new team of 10 Traffic Enforcement Agents dedicated to targeted enforcement of placard rules, according to the administration. The team will focus on particular hot spots in Lower Manhattan or Downtown Brooklyn, the two areas most plagued by placard abuse. Working with NYPD, DOT will hire, train and acquire the equipment for this team within one year. They will be empowered to ticket vehicles abusing their placard privileges or using fake placards.
According to the City, in 2018, there were roughly 125,500 City-issued placards. The DOT issued 50,000, NYPD issued 44,000 and DOE issued 31,500. This total number does not include State or federal placards. Since the 2017 announcement, there has been a 93 percent increase in NYPD summons for illegal parking while displaying a placard (from the 2016 baseline.) There were 28,269 summonses in 2016; 41,931 in 2017; and 54,608 last year.
