Here’s an excerpt from today’s Associated Press story about the parking vacation in Park Slope. With all these headlines about our parking situation, Slopers are afraid that parkers from everywhere will be coming to the Slope this summer.
And what about the moratorium on street cleaning? What’s that about. Isn’t summer the stinkiest time of the year when it comes to garbage.
NEW YORK (AP) — In this densely populated city, residents compete for jobs, apartments, subway seats, taxicabs, even treadmills in the gym.
So when the city announced it was suspending parking regulations in one of its most crowded districts, it inspired something close to pandemonium.
“Park Slopers rejoice!” blared a headline in the Brooklyn Paper about the lifting of restrictions on alternate-side parking in the borough’s trendy Park Slope neighborhood.
New York’s alternate-side parking rules require drivers to move their cars several times a week, as posted on a sign, so streets can be cleaned. The rules are suspended for 34 legal and religious holidays.
For car owners in New York, the ritual of moving one’s vehicle for street sweepers is as much a way of marking the days as the work week, and scofflaws are ticketed.
Until recently in most areas, curbs had to be clear for three hours, but the city is moving to reduce the length of time during which parking is prohibited to just 90 minutes — which means replacing thousands of street signs.
While the city switches Park Slope — so named for the gentle rise in land toward Brooklyn’s Prospect Park — to the 90-minute schedule, it is removing the old signs and suspending the rules until the new signs are in place.
During that period, which began May 19 and will run for several months, drivers can park anywhere alternate-side parking used to be in effect, for as long as they want.
Karen Cani, a 51-year-old carpet store employee who drives to work in Park Slope, could hardly believe the news when she heard it. She confirmed it from the city’s information hot line, then parked, with great excitement, in a previously forbidden zone.
Problem was, she miscalculated and was one block out of the territory where rules were suspended. “I come out, and I’ve got a ticket,” she said.
The other day I walked from 5th Avenue and 9th Street to 7th Avenue and Carroll Street with a food wrapper until I found a trash can. Without meaning to throw bouquets at myself–although they might improve the aroma of our streets as time goes on–one wonders how many people would not have thrown this wrapper into the not-to-be-cleaned streets somewhere along the way.