By Michael V. Cusenza
Old Howard Beach small business owners and residents are fed up with Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers’ defiance of parking rules—and they’re not taking it anymore.
MTA personnel working on the Rockaway Line Resiliency and Rehabilitation Project have been taking up valuable spots along 159th Road and in Coleman Square for several hours at a time, ignoring meters in certain cases and making construction vests visible so authorities might move on and not penalize them, area entrepreneurs and community leaders told The Forum this week.
“It’s ridiculous,” community leader Eddie Earl said. “You go into stores—they’re ghost towns. You can’t park anywhere.”
The authority is completing repairs to aging infrastructure in the Rockaways to make the peninsula’s public transportation more resilient against climate change. The damage caused by Superstorm Sandy was extensive and trains were suspended for seven months while crews worked hard to make emergency repairs that restored A and S service to the Rockaways. The Rockaway Line, which carries the A and S trains, is the critical connection between the Rockaway peninsula and the rest of New York City, serving more than 9,000 daily riders and connecting a diverse population of almost 125,000 residents. As climate change accelerates and sea levels continue to rise, MTA officials said that it is essential that the agency build infrastructure with extra resiliency features so NYC’s transit system can withstand future storm surges. Many components of the Rockaway Line are over 65 years old, which necessitates significant resilience upgrades to harden vulnerable and aging infrastructure against rising sea levels. While emergency work to restore service as quickly as possible was completed immediately following Superstorm Sandy, ongoing construction builds upon those repairs, according to the MTA.
After receiving phone calls from the business community, Earl took more than a dozen pictures of vehicles with the interiors featuring common construction vests resting on the dashboard or near the rear window. Many of the MTA motorists don’t even bother to feed the meter, with some leaving their cars in the same spot for eight hours or longer, Earl noted.
Photo Courtesy of Eddie Earl
Some MTA workers seem to be taking advantage of Old Howard Beach parking.
Parking is already scarce in the area. Ray Florio, who’s been working at Sal’s Food Market on 159th Road for three decades, said the practice is impacting the bottom lines of OHB small businesses.
“My customers come in and say ‘I tried coming here three times last week,’” said Florio, who lives near the market.
According to Florio, for the last two weeks 18 such vehicles have remained parked in valuable spots for at least eight hours a day. He also noted that “they park in my driveway, fire hydrants—anywhere. It’s a free-for-all. Put a vest in the window and you can park all over Howard Beach.”
“But the [MTA] workers have a designated parking lot on the other side,” a flabbergasted Florio added. “I don’t get it.”
City Councilwoman Joann Ariola (r-Ozone Park) got the message. She reached out to the NYPD and on Tuesday more than a dozen parking tickets were issued.
Florio hopes the punitive blitz continues—at least until the workers get the message and park elsewhere.
“It’s killing my store,” he said on Tuesday.
