All these governmental employees have a system worked out where they STEAL parking in a corrupt scheme.
Here’s how it works: they display a placard or a vest or something anything to signal to traffic enforcement offficers that they are “part of the team” (that is, government employees.)
Since the parking enforcement agents herself also steals parking, they all have a vested interest in applying a very lax standard----this has led to ordinary non-governmental employees also finding ways to benefit from this corruption. I do not blame these people so much as I blame the corruptors themselves.
When there is a crackdown, it’s a fake display: ALL GOVERNMENT WORKERS ARE IN ON IT.
When a crackdown happens, they don’t go after the real abusers: government employees with no legal or moral right to free parking—they go after the private citizens trying to leech off the benefits. There’s a reason for this: it’s about protecting their turf.
They’re saying: “Only we, the government worker gets to steal parking from the community, not you the private shitizen.”
There’s a twitter account that catalogues this phenomenon: [
Teachers? What are they putting in the window, some post-its and gold star stickers? Teachers tend to park at the school they work at in the parking lot, so I’m not sure why they are included in this.
Your complaint seems to be about NYC- but I’m not 100% sure what it is exactly. Putting a vest or something similar in the windshield is different from putting an official placard in the windshield, and even with the official placard, it doesn’t mean the driver can park anywhere they want to - some placards allow parking only in DOE authorized spaces around schools ( most of which don’t have parking lots) or precinct or housing development parking lots. Even those permits that are valid for street parking anywhere don’t allow parking in bus stops, fire hydrants, in certain neighborhoods, in “no standing” or “no stopping” zones. Many of the placards are issued to official vehicles , not personal ones and those who have placards issued for personal vehicles have them because they use their personal vehicles on official business and aren’t permitted to use the placard when they are not on official business. The fact that they aren’t permitted to doesn’t mean they don’t - but every official placard I’ve seen (which is not nearly all agencies) has a phone number to report misuse.
Your complaint seems to be about NYC- but I’m not 100% sure what it is exactly.
Because I don’t understand what your point is. Are you complaining only about people who are parking with vests in the windshield or are you also complaining about people using legitimately issued placards on official business or something else altogether?
Public employees are using placards vests etc. to park illegally even in places that would be illegal even with a placard, with the understanding that the people who issue tickets give them a pass since they are a member of the public employee brotherhood.
So non-public employees have figured this out and are also putting up fake, placards, vests etc. so they don’t get ticketed.
The police are cracking down on those who put up the fake stuff to park illegally but not those who put up real placards even though they are parking just as illegally.
This bothers the OP who think that the best way to deal with this is rather than trying to crack down on those who put on fake displays, they should crack down on anyone who tries to get out of a parking ticket this way whether its fake or not.
One way to look at it is a illegally parked car is one more legal spot for you (i.e. someone who parks legally) to park in.
Now if your bitchin’ that someone took your illegal spot and is sporting a false crossing guard vest on the dashboard instead of you legit placard (that would not get you the parking space legally but would get you out of a parking ticket), well that sucks.
In my perfect world people would be crystal clear about what the hell they are getting at in their OP and we wouldn’t need other posters guessing at what they might mean.
@KennyT these discussions are more fruitful with less ambiguous posts.
Given that all his other inarticulate OPs & posts are about how utterly untrustworthy all police everywhere are, he seems to have a bee under his bonnet about the government in general, and law enforcement in particular.
Said another way, this is just another waste of bits by just another one trick waste of oxygen.
To the point that when I saw this thread title on the New contents page I guessed he was the OP before I opened the thread. Turns out I guessed right.
I’m not sure what the complaint is exactly, but everyone in NYC knows that parking abuse is a very, very real issue.
To start with, the police and firefighters don’t even bother with placards. They just park wherever they want, including on the sidewalk. If you live on the same block as a police precinct, forget about ever parking on your block, or maybe even pushing a stroller down the sidewalk, because the cops have parked their private cars all over the place.
And you’re right – you see the vests or something like that on the dashboard, and the parking agents extend “professional courtesy.” Funny – back decades ago, when the parking agents wore brown uniforms, they’d put a bag of M&Ms on the dashboard – that was the signal that this car shouldn’t be ticketed.
And then there’s placard abuse. There are all kinds of people with parking permits. Many of them are campaign contributors to high-ranking city officials.
And some are just ridiculous. There’s a person in my neighborhood who has a “clergy/chaplain” placard on the dashboard of his Maserati. His Maserati. Obviously no vow of poverty in whatever religion he’s a clergyman. And he’s just parking in front of his home, anyway. I’m surprised his car hasn’t been keyed.
Teachers get parking placards to be used at the school where they work.
I grew up in an apartment building in Queens. By coincidence (as far as I know) a whole bunch of NYC public school teachers (including my mother) lived in that building. They all had parking permits for work, of course. But the apartment building was on the same block as a public junior high school. Instant exemption from parking tickets for all those teachers – they’d just put the card on the dashboard.
Parking abuse is indeed a big deal in NYC, as you probably know.