Making New York Undrivable
So I’ve got this theory that because Bloomberg had his congestion tax shot down he’s decided to make New York as uninhabitable as possible for drivers. This includes turning busy intersections into parks and turning one of two lanes on the incredibly busy Broadway into a bus only lane. As an inhabitant of Soho (roughly), I’ve been particularly interested in the bus thing as I’ve both watched countless people get ticketed while walking to work and been annoyed while in a cab that they wouldn’t just pull into the right lane and speed past traffic (because they were afraid of said tickets).
Anyway, I was writing all this because I just saw this New York Times breakdown on parking tickets given and discovered that 10,997 tickets were given on that stretch of one-lane Broadway, but then I realized that parking tickets and traffic tickets were different. Even so, it’s a lot of tickets and in total, there were 9,955,441 parking tickets given out in New York City between July 2007 to June 2008 (which is a Holy Crap Fact I believe).
Hi, I'm 
“turning busy intersections into parks and turning one of two lanes on the incredibly busy Broadway into a bus only lane”, A wonderful dream!, but to make this happen the Bloomberg Administration will need to do more then tickets, charging bridges and making the city very expensive. To change human behaviors it should not be just about charging more money and making things expensive, It should be about public services, role models and social responsibilities like: Green Buses, Good Subway Systems (the subways are worst then ever), Public Education, making equals sociaty, avoiding luxury mushroom. Even if Broadway below Houston has a bus lane I am still not feeling that I am walking a greener better city yet.
So that’s what, one parking ticket per resident ratio? Insane. Though it is much more likely 3-5 times that on a per-car-driver basis. Numbers would be interesting.
(I can’t be the only one with a line item in the budget to pay parking tickets with…But that was mostly when my boyfriend still lived in the French Quarter.)
i account for a solid .0000009% of said tickets, totaling near 800$. hell hath no fury like a nypd meter maid’s scorn for a mis-parked prius.
You have to love what Bloomberg is doing about bike lanes… Buffered bike lanes (those separated by a parking lane) are popping up all over the city, they just opened one on Hudson Street and the Grand Street one looks set to open soon:
http://www.nycbikemaps.com/spokes/grand-street-protected-bicycle-path/