70th Precinct Led City In Wrongful Curbside Ramp Ticketing, Analysis Shows
A recent analysis by public interest website I Quant NY unearthed an incredible detail about the NYPD’s ticketing practices.
Despite the fact that it is now legal, the NYPD has continued to ticket drivers for parking in front of pedestrian ramps which are not connected to a crosswalk — and the 70th Precinct has led the way, issuing hundreds of tickets tickets worth around $100,000 annually.
I Quant NY creator and Pratt Institute urban planning professor Ben Wellington notes that since late 2008, New York City drivers have been allowed to park in front of sidewalk ramps for pedestrians that are not connected to a crosswalk, but the rule change has not been put into practice by all police officers.
Wellington reports that the top address in New York City where drivers were wrongfully ticketed for parking in front of a pedestrian ramp was 575 Ocean Avenue (between Church Avenue and Albemarle Road), “where over $48,000 in parking fines were issued in the last 2.5 years.”
Wellington’s analysis found that almost 2,000 (1,966) parking spots across New York City received 5 or more pedestrian ramp tickets in the last 2.5 years. After randomly checking them, Wellington argues that the majority of these spots are actually legal. Yet drivers have received about $1.7 million a year in tickets for parking in front of them, he says.
There are 59 such spots are in the 70th Precinct, and the 70th appears to have wrongfully ticked the most cars (1,691 tickets in the last 2.5 years) of any precinct in the city, Wellington reports, generating over $100,000 in fines annually.
Wellington mapped the top 1,000 pedestrian ramps generating parking tickets across the city. You can see some of the hot spots in our area below.
Go to any hot spot on Wellington’s map, and click on it. You can see if tickets are given in front of, or opposite the address, as well as how many tickets have been issued.
Wellington approached the NYPD with these findings and they responded positively, saying that “the department’s internal analysis found that patrol officers who are unfamiliar with the [rule] change have…issued a summons in error.”
“When the rule changed in 2009 to allow for certain pedestrian ramps to be blocked by parked vehicles, the department focused training on traffic agents, who write the majority of summonses,” the NYPD stated. “Yet, the majority of summonses written for this code violation were written by police officers.”
The NYPD told Wellington that they are communicating with “commanders of precincts with the highest number of summonses, informing them of the issues within their command.”
The larger question of course is why these ramps were constructed in the first place, and whether they were actually part of an unsuccessful attempt to create more options for pedestrians.