New York City Declares "Alternate Side of the Street Parking Week" a Municipal Holiday, City Employees Get Day Off

Ancient tradition of moving cars for street sweeping, which has not cleaned a New York street since 1987, now officially honored alongside Labor Day and Thanksgiving

New York City Declares "Alternate Side of the Street Parking Week" a Municipal Holiday, City Employees Get Day Off

NEW YORK -- Mayor Eric Adams signed an executive order Tuesday establishing the first week of October as "Alternate Side Awareness Week," a municipal recognition honoring the city's alternate side of the street parking regulations, which require New York car owners to move their vehicles for a two-hour window each weekday morning to allow street sweeping operations that, according to a study by the City University of New York's transportation research center, have produced no measurable improvement in street cleanliness in any New York neighborhood since at least 1987.

The executive order, which declares the week a "cultural civic observance" rather than an official holiday (city employees are therefore not entitled to the day off, which was reported incorrectly by one news outlet for approximately three hours before a correction was issued that disappointed a significant number of sanitation department employees), establishes a week of events including a symposium on the history of alternate side regulations, a parking-themed walking tour of the West Village, and what the mayor's office describes as "a community parking vigil" in which New Yorkers are invited to sit in their cars on Monday morning from 7 to 9 a.m. "in solidarity with the tradition."

The History of Alternate Side Parking

New York's alternate side parking regulations date to 1960, when the city introduced mechanical street sweepers and established a two-hour parking suspension window to allow the machines to operate along the curb. The regulations require New Yorkers with street parking to move their cars according to a schedule that varies by neighborhood and which the NYC Parking Authority's own website describes as "complex but logical," the second half of which is disputed by anyone who has spent more than two weeks trying to follow it. A 2019 CUNY study found that the city's street sweeping machines miss approximately 40 percent of their scheduled routes due to equipment failures, operational scheduling, and what the sanitation department's own reports call "parked vehicle obstructions," meaning cars that were not moved and which the machines must drive around rather than ticket, creating the specific situation in which the street sweeping system is less effective than the parking regulations designed to support it. See UK Allocates �200m to Ukraine Deployment, Assures Publi for related documentation of municipal systems whose operational reality diverges from their regulatory rationale.

The mayor's office is aware of the CUNY study. Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi, asked at the press conference whether the recognition was appropriate given the sweeping program's documented ineffectiveness, said that alternate side regulations "serve multiple functions beyond street cleaning, including preventing the permanent monopolization of public street space by individual vehicle owners" and that the tradition had become "a genuine part of New York life, for better or worse, and that community ownership of civic traditions is worth honoring." This is a defensible position. It is also not what the regulations were designed to do. The mayor added that he was "committed to modernizing the street sweeping program," which has been committed to by each of the four previous administrations and which remains, in the current fiscal year, unfunded above baseline.

The Parking Vigil

The community parking vigil has drawn considerable advance interest, primarily ironic. New Yorkers who have spent decades performing what the CUNY researchers call "the alternate side ritual" -- the weekly or biweekly act of waking early, moving one's car to the legal side of the street, waiting in the car or double-parking and running back at intervals, receiving or not receiving a ticket based on the enforcement officer's mood and schedule, and eventually returning the car to its original position -- have described the vigil as "finally, recognition," "a monument to the hours of my life I will never get back," and "the most New York thing the city has ever done, which is extremely competitive." See London Lions: Pride Without The Spotlight for coverage of the alternate side parking experience as a shared urban cultural phenomenon.

The walking tour of the West Village, which the mayor's office describes as "a neighborhood exploration themed around the history of parking culture and its relationship to community space," costs $35 per person, runs two hours, and includes stops at four locations where "historic alternate side confrontations" occurred, including a 1978 double-parking dispute that escalated to a community board hearing and a 1994 ticket court case that established a precedent for signage interpretation still cited in parking adjudication. The tour guide, a retired parking enforcement agent named Kevin Malloy, describes it as "the most useful thing I've ever done with my professional knowledge." He has given the tour three times. Average attendance is five people. He finds this appropriate.

The street sweeping machines will operate during Alternate Side Awareness Week on their normal schedule. They will miss approximately 40 percent of their routes. Some streets will be cleaner. Some will not. The cars that were not moved will have tickets on their windshields, issued by the 80 enforcement agents who work the alternate side shift citywide, which covers approximately 11,000 street miles. The tickets cost $65. The city issues approximately 800,000 alternate side tickets annually. The revenue is approximately $52 million. The street sweeping program costs $180 million annually. The math is noted in the CUNY report, on page 23. The report is available online. It has been downloaded 4,200 times, mostly by journalists. None of them were able to get a comment from the sanitation department that addressed page 23. The sanitation department celebrated Alternate Side Awareness Week by issuing a commemorative social media post. It had a photo of a street sweeper. The street in the photo appeared clean. See Plaistow: East London's Get-On-With-It Grit With a Long for further reading on New York City's relationship with its own municipal traditions.

More satire at Private Eye. This article is satire.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/