The city is apparently serious about issuing tickets to cars and drivers parking or stopping in bike lanes — at least temporarily.
Yesterday, an EVG reader who lives on Third Street between Avenue A and Avenue B told me that she received a $110 ticket for double parking in the newly created bike lane while waiting for the street sweeper during Alternate Side Parking.
She explained that the established practice on the block for at least the past seven years is that you double park, often even leaving your car unattended for a short period of time, and wait for the street sweeper to pass ... then you move your vehicle into a freshly swept space. It's the usual game of musical vehicles that takes place citywide on alt-parking days.
Yesterday, every car that was double parked on the block received a $110 ticket — for "double parking in a bike lane." (The ticket would have been far less expensive — $65 — had the drivers simply not moved their cars for Alternate Side Parking.) According to the resident, this was the first time — at least the past seven years — that the city ticketed drivers for such an offense during street cleaning.
The bike lane is new along here, however.
In late June, the city added pavement markings and signage on Third Street between Avenue D and Second Avenue.
In response to increased road fatalities this year (
an 18.3-percent increase over 2018) and including 15 cyclists,
Mayor de Blasio in early July ordered the NYPD and DOT to crackdown on drivers and cars parked in bike lanes.
As Curbed noted, "The heightened enforcement seeks to target violations including speeding, running lights, not yielding to bikers and pedestrians, obstructing bike lanes, and double parking from July 1–21." (Of course, the NYPD
is often the worst offenders of parking in bike lanes.)
In any event, cycling activists weren't impressed by the mayor's directive earlier this month. As Jon Orcutt of Bike NY told
Streetsblog on July 2. "Treating it like a momentary aberration won’t protect cyclists in August or thereafter."
As for the resident, she wishes at the very least that the 9th Precinct would have given residents a heads up about the ticketing blitz, which will likely cease after July 21.
