EXPLAINER: Why Mayor de Blasio’s Placard Abuse Announcement Today Will Fall Short Here's a full primer on the catastrophe of illegal, city-sanctioned parking — and what the mayor should do.

This afternoon, the de Blasio administration will release details of its long-awaited effort to curb placard abuse.

Don’t get your hopes up.

If you’ve walked New York City’s streets, particularly those surrounding government buildings, you’ve seen the many forms of placard abuse: there’s legal (but still destructive) parking with legal city placards; there’s illegal parking using legal placards; and there’s illegal parking by flashing a fake placard, a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association card, an angry letter or even a reflective vest in the window.

Across the city, public officials and imposters get away with illegal and unsafe parking in front of fire hydrants and crosswalks, in bike lanes and bus lanes — and even on sidewalks. Yet the placards keep coming and coming. The de Blasio administration has continued the practice of allocating tens of thousands of existing placards, plus it doled out 50,000 more placards to public school employees, bringing the official city count to well over 140,000. That increase follows a downward trend from the Bloomberg administration, which reduced placards by more than half, according to DOT counts at the time.

De Blasio has even rebuffed attempts by the City Council to address the problem through legislation, most recently last week, when Council Speaker Corey Johnson and colleagues unveiled a package of bills. The mayor, meanwhile, continues to promise a crackdown is coming.

It’s not clear whether today’s announcement will alter the city’s so-far meager efforts to curtail placards, or propose a more effective strategy moving forward.

Crackdowns have come and gone over the last three decades, but placard corruption persists for a simple reason: the NYPD is in charge of enforcing illegal parking — and NYPD officers are not willing to enforce basic parking laws on their own kind.

Speaking of @placardabuse here is the 114 pct a couple days ago. Van: officer says it is a police vehicle.

NJ sedan: booted, boot falling off.

GMC: officer's car with flag partially obscuring plate. All on sidewalk. pic.twitter.com/OJkRBLCzvc — Steven Bodzin (home) (@stevenbodzin) August 15, 2018

How did we get here? Fasten your seatbelts, it’s time for a bumpy ride:

How does placard abuse work?

Parking placards are the ultimate perk. They give municipal employees carte blanche to park wherever they wish. And you don’t even need to have an actual placard to exercise it, as the persistence of NYPD badges, guidebooks, ledgers, handwritten notes and the like on illegally parked cars demonstrates.

Very little about placards is written into actual law. Section 4-08(o) of the city’s traffic rules allows for a number of different permits for “special parking privileges,” including municipal parking permits, clergy parking permits, and “yearly permits for parking in contradiction to rules on city streets.”

The rules vary by type permit: Clergy, for example, may park on any street adjacent to a house of worship or hospital. Municipal parking permits are limited to zones designated for the specific agencies to which they are assigned (there are signs all over town, for example, that name agencies in all branches of government where those employees are allowed to park with a placard).

And yearly permits — which are supposedly only for non-profits — allow placard holders to park in certain restricted areas, but are only valid in metered spots, truck loading and unloading zones, “no parking” areas, and spots reserved for “authorized vehicles only.” Their use is explicitly prohibited in front of “no standing” and “no stopping” zones, fire hydrants, bus stops, travel lanes, driveways, and “area where a traffic hazard would be created.” In other words, the cars can’t become a nuisance or cause unsafe conditions for pedestrians, cyclists or other drivers. That’s the law.

But placard holders know what the rules don’t say: A placard in your dashboard is a free parking pass. It doesn’t matter whether the placard-holder is on official business or even using the car to which the placard is assigned.

Don’t believe us? Walk around any police precinct or school in the city. Stroll the streets around out government buildings in Lower Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn, and Jamaica, Queens. Or just hop on over to the @placardabuse Twitter account, where watchdogs have been documenting the problem for more than three years.

The problem comes down to enforcement, or lack thereof. In the hands of the NYPD, it’s often non-existent.

Simply put: Cops don’t write tickets against other cops. And they’re loath to write tickets against fellow government workers — in part for fear of retaliation for ticketing a superior. Case-in-point: In 2004, DOT traffic agent Barbara Soto-Centeno was suspended for two weeks without pay after giving a parking summons to then-NYPD Transportation Chief Michael Scagnelli, the very man responsible for the police department’s traffic enforcement efforts.

“It’s notoriously difficult to enforce,” Brooklyn-based parking guru Rachel Weinberger told Streetsblog. “The alignment is wrong. You’re enforcing a crime that you’re committing.”

And placard corruption isn’t limited to cops. Politicians are some of its greatest practitioners. In 2017, for example, when Brooklyn Assembly Member Diana Richardson parked illegally outside of her office on Empire Boulevard district office, she posted the traffic agent’s name on Facebook. (The post was eventually deleted.) Later that year, then-State Senator Marty Golden, a former NYPD cop, flashed his parking placard and threatened to arrest a cyclist his driver was tailgating in a bike lane. More recently, State Senator Kevin Parker told a GOP senate staffer to kill herself after she identified his car illegally parked in a bike lane. It does not appear than any of these people were sanctioned.

It’s not clear exactly what types of placards New Yorkers typically see used to disobey parking rules. The traffic regulations make no mention of NYPD-issued placards. But it doesn’t much matter — as long as you have any type of placard, your chances of getting a ticket are slim.

The report that de Blasio says he will issue on Thursday is a much-delayed follow-up to the mayor’s mid-2017 promise to crack down on the problem. At the time, de Blasio’s solution was to launch a dedicated placard enforcement unit. Since then, the city has doled out 95,228 summonses for placard abuse as of the end of 2018, according to NYPD. Around 200 vehicles have been towed.

That effect appears to be a drop in the bucket. The impact of this supposed enforcement has been negligible. The @placardabuse Twitter account repeatedly riffs on the city’s supposed crackdown — and the seemingly endless parade of examples that show it’s a farce.

What’s missing? Critics argue that the mayor isn’t taking the problem seriously enough.

“There has to be a will to enforce it. It’s just not complicated,” Bloomberg administration DOT official Bruce Schaller told Streetsblog. “I’m sympathetic to NYPD. Why would they want to enforce this against other law enforcement? It has to be made not a choice. It has to be a directive from the mayor.”

How did we get here?

It’s all part of history now, but Bloomberg was far from the first mayor to attempt to tackle the placard abuse problem. In the aftermath of the Parking Violations Bureau scandals that almost brought down the Koch administration, then mayor-Ed Koch announced in 1986 plans to dramatically reduce the number of placards in circulation, from 54,000 to 15,000.

At the time, the city had fewer people and there was more space for the on-street storage of cars than today. The public concern, to the extent that it existed, was narrowly concentrated in the area of Manhattan below Canal Street where — then, as now — placard-wielding government employees were clogging up nearly all of the available curbside parking spots. That enraged businesses who relied those spots for deliveries demanded action.

To tackle the problem, Koch and DOT Commissioner Ross Sandler curtailed the number of placards and took the power of placard distribution away from more than 100 different agencies, reducing it to a committee representing just four: the FBI, NYPD, DOT, and the state unified courts system.

The “Law Enforcement Parking Committee” vetted every placard in the city, according to Shauna Tarshis Denkensohn, who served as its chair and later led DOT’s Authorized Parking and Permits office.

“Part of the problem that we were solving was that there were permits being issued by every agency to whomever they wanted, and there was nobody to say no,” Denkensohn told Streetsblog. “We sent out a form and every agency had to tell us who need permits and why, and then we went through agency-by-agency, job description-by-job description.”

Still, police placards remained the jurisdiction of the police department — excused from the 15,000-placard cap, according to contemporaneous news reports. The blocks around police precincts and courthouses, already inundated with illegally parked cars, remained inundated. Police officers and firefighters continued to hoard sidewalk space around their station houses.

“I fought it, and we got it down, saying, ‘Look, you cannot have this,'” Denkensohn said of law enforcement placard use. “There were certain precincts that took it to heart, and others that didn’t.”

Sometimes in the 1990s, however, the Koch era placard committee was disbanded. Placards fell back under the jurisdiction of the NYPD. The city grew, as did its workforce. The number of placards ballooned — to nearly 142,000 by 2008.

That year marked Bloomberg’s second attempt at placard reform. He had declared war on parking placards during his 2001 mayoral run, and upon taking office in 2002 ordered city agencies to cut back on their numbers. But it took another six years before the city even ventured to figure out how many placards were in circulation.

In the late 2000s, the city once again consolidated distribution with NYPD and DOT and slashed the number of placards by upwards of 50 percent. But the perk persisted — with the tacit approval of the mayor himself, who, despite his hardline stance against municipal employees’ placards, continued to hand out permits to political supporters like famed salsa musician Willie Colón, who happened to serve on a city commission that met four times a year.

The progress made under Bloomberg has been reversed by Mayor de Blasio, whose administration repeatedly resists attempts at reform. There appears to be little interest in addressing the problem on a grand scale, and enforcement remains entirely insufficient. The decision to offer placards to the city’s 50,000 public school teachers — the bulk of the Bloomberg era placard reduction — only compounded the problem.

Today, sidewalks and playgrounds around schools look much like the areas around police precincts. In 2019, there are at least 124,000 city-issued placards, if you believe numbers given to Gothamist by DOT earlier this week (Streetsblog’s count is higher). The placards are issued by DOT, NYPD, and the Department of Education — but that only scratches the surface. Further complicating matters, placards aren’t the exclusive jurisdiction of the city. Federal and state agency placards are totally out of its control. And counterfeit placards are everywhere.