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When Brooklyn City Councilmember Lincoln Restler sent people from his office out to count just how many people were illegally parking in downtown Brooklyn during a few weeks this spring, he had a hunch that it was a pretty sizable proportion of the cars parked in the cramped, bustling, and growing warren of parks, bridges, universities, courts, and office buildings stretching 60 surveyed blocks. He just had no idea it was…virtually everyone.
"When we sent out our team into the neighborhood, I didn't anticipate that they would find nearly 500 illegally parked cars every single day. The scale and ubiquity of illegal parking across the neighborhood means that it's dangerous for parents with strollers, cyclists, people in wheelchairs, and it just shouldn't be this way," Restler told Hell Gate on Tuesday afternoon, as he walked through idling and congested car traffic during rush hour. "People know they can park whenever they want and get away with it."
Restler's survey, conducted over a four-week period from May to June, found that on an average weekday, there are 457 illegally parked vehicles in Downtown Brooklyn. Worse than just being illegally parked, 41 percent of the vehicles had "official parking placards," each of them one of the tens of thousands given out by the City granting city workers the ability to park in designated spaces—but which are often used by those workers to achieve king-like powers to park wherever they deem fit, like on sidewalks or no standing zones, with zero fear of repercussions from the NYPD. The study also found 16 percent have fake placards or use other somewhat lazy signifiers, like the classic "throwing of the orange vest or something that looks vaguely construction-like" on the dashboard.