But in fact, there is more. Heavily ticketed businesses have been training their drivers and negotiating with the city for relief. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is poised to leave office after 12 years with congestion as bad as ever, little more than a few pilot projects in place, and a lot of unhappy people. Businesses still hate the fines; some are suing. Critics condemn the ticket discounts some companies get, arguing that they institutionalize the problem and worsen congestion.

The cost to businesses is steep, but the windfall for the city is huge: an expected $550 million this year from parking violations, compared with $197 million from parking meters.The city has set up two programs to address industry complaints and help ease the process. The Department of Finance's stipulated-fine program expedites the payment of parking tickets and, in some cases, halves or even eliminates penalties. Vehicles in the program can legally double-park anywhere except midtown Manhattan, but tickets issued to them cannot be contested.But business insiders and transportation experts complain that the city's commercial-parking programs amount to legitimizing illegal behavior."It's a disgrace," said one prominent real estate developer who asked to remain anonymous. "There is no reason why FedEx and UPS should be occupying curb lanes for the next 50 years. And the city has not lifted a finger to get those guys off the street."Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, was more delicate in his criticism. "You have big delivery companies writing the [cost of] tickets into their business plans," he said. "Preferably, they should be paying the same rate as everybody else, because getting a discount on a parking ticket just exacerbates the problem of congestion. They'll just park there all day long."Robert Grotell, a traffic consultant and former high-ranking transportation official in the Bloomberg and Giuliani administrations, said some in city government see congestion as a sign of economic prosperity, and parking tickets as a way to plug budget gaps. And the city's stipulated-fine programs, while adjudicating the process, may make things worse in the long run."It seems to me that it encourages violations," he said. "If you know the hammer isn't as heavy as it was ... It's a cost of doing business, and now that cost has been reduced."City sources say the stipulated-fine program is unpopular with the police, because it undermines enforcement, and with the Department of Transportation, because it contradicts the city's sustainability goal of using sound parking policy to reduce pollution.But the Finance Department has no plans to change its commercial-parking programs, in which 1,203 companies are enrolled. "The program was structured based on what we saw judges doing in court and mimics that behavior," a department spokesman said. "The program was designed so that participants don't pay more or less than they would if they had contested their tickets."Some heavily ticketed companies accuse the city of trying to game the system to help meet quotas and balance the budget. In 2011, the New York Trucking & Delivery Association filed a class-action suit against the city, claiming millions in illegal parking tickets were issued to its members. Plaintiffs say the city has stalled the lawsuit for two years, but a judge is expected to decide soon whether to allow the case to be heard by a jury.Ken Thorpe, chairman and CEO of the trucking association, said that to make up for a drop in revenue, traffic-enforcement agents began issuing tickets for blocked lanes, which the program does not cover, rather than double-parking. The city denies wrongdoing and has tried several times to get the case dismissed."This was a manipulation of the laws to rig the [stipulated-fine] program to produce more money than it should have on the backs of truckers," Mr. Thorpe said.Martha Stark, a former Finance Department commissioner who helped create the parking programs in 2005, said the intent was to ensure a more predictable revenue stream for the city, not to ease congestion or reduce the amount of tickets issued overall