The goal of fines is meant to be to discourage specific problematic behaviours, like parking where it would cause problems for the fire department.

When the goal becomes to cause the behaviour more often so that your can collect more fines, the entire system is just fundamentally broken.

A large portion of the money collected should go to a department whose goal is to find further ways to discourage the problematic behaviour. Paint the curb bright red, for starters.

Check out this follow-up post: https://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/87573867759/success-how-nyc...

It shows how the city updated the paint marks for 2 of those illegal parking spots after they were made aware of the issue.

And sadly since updating the marks, on 3 out of 5 street view photos of one of these places someone has parked there anyway: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7184242,-73.9928144,3a,75y,3...

This is why the basic solution of calling the firefighters out to break the windows of the vehicle and run a hose through it is more an actual solution.

Apparently it worked to get the Soviet diplomats to stop parking in front of hydrants.

Not sure I'm in love with the idea of emergency services spending a bunch of time breaking windows and putting hoses through a car.

Although not in love with fire hydrants as a revenue source either.

I've got a feeling that there are so many false fire alarms that fire crews probably don't bother getting out the hoses until they see smoke at least.

Remember the truck has a couple of minutes supply of water onboard, so hooking up to a hydrant immediately isn't the top priority anyways.

You don't need to get out the hoses to break the windows. You just need to have the FD drive by and break the windows, then receive an unexpected higher priority call so they just jump back on the truck and drive away to that next call. Hell, you don't even need to send a truck. Allow the citizens to take civic pride in their city and institute a "no charges will be brought" type of situations for breaking windows of cars illegally parked in front of hydrants.

> Allow the citizens to take civic pride in their city and institute a "no charges will be brought" type of situations for breaking windows of cars illegally parked in front of hydrants.

Fun. Then we get kids putting a cardboard box over the hydrant and playing "what box?" after smashing your windows.

Varies by municipality: when parking anywhere, look for blue reflectors in the middle of the road. There's usually one or two per street. They denote where the fire hydrants are so the FD can easily find them when cars block curbside visibility. You can use the same feature to avoid hidden hydrants yourself.

>look for blue reflectors in the middle of the road.

In marching band, we referred to those as Smurf Shit, and the drum captain would whack the snare a particular way to let the rest of the band know of its presence so nobody tripped over it

Until a panel van parks there.

You can cut a hole through a panel van with a standard tool in the firefighter arsenal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_rescue_tool

That doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be easy to toss a hose through it without delaying the fire response.

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/work-van-full-debris-its-way...

Hydraulic cutters are slow AF and they're not going to remove bulk material that is in the way.

The whole point is it's done when it's NOT actually an emergency; they just do it because it's parked wrong.

I'd prefer my local fire department keep their staff and equipment available for emergency use, not for parking enforcement.

> A large portion of the money collected should go to a department whose goal is to find further ways to discourage the problematic behaviour. Paint the curb bright red, for starters.

That would still not really align incentives. If a particular action (parking next to a fire hydrant) produced revenue for that department, they will be financially incentivized to encourage more of that action, not less of it.

If the government somehow lost money rather than gained money when someone did something naughty, then maybe they'd work to try to reduce that naughty behavior.

In Royal Oak, MI, the city recently contracted Municipal Parking Services, a Minnesota-based company, to install a new parking system which reads plates and automatically issues fines after a 5-minute grace period (mailed to your house.) The system is a bit confusing and unexpected to visitors.

A DDA study determined that 43% of visitors were being fined.

As a result of getting ticketed, I've heard many people in Michigan say they won't visit Royal Oak anymore.

So I guess that's one way to discentivize yourself.

Alternatively, such a department might not be funded by the fines, but merely funded at a flat rate, like an auditor.

> The goal of fines is to discourage ... When the goal becomes ... collect more fines,... the entire system is just fundamentally broken.

Your assumption is that fines discourage. If fines discourage, and the goal is to maximize discouragement, that will occur when fines are maximized.

...unless you think the fines are so large that we've gone past the peak discouragement point, where people are so scared of the fines that they no longer maximize their misbehavior. In this case, if we decrease fines, revenue to the city will increase! the Laffer parking curve!

The beatings will stop when morale improves.

The solution is to never have the agency giving the fine benefiting from the fine.

The best solution (and, no, I'm not joking) would be destroy all funds raised in government fines, nationwide. Send the fines directly to the Federal Reserve balance sheet.

Fines generally suck anyway, because they allow people that can easily afford them to break the law.

Or we could replace fines with suspension of driver privileges.

Sure, as soon as you have a viable method for funding the services that rely on that revenue.

They're called taxes. You want the service--pay for it.

Using fines as a "revenue source" introduces so many perverse incentives into the system that it automatically becomes corrupt.

See: the incestuous relationships between the towing/repossession companies and the police.

Fines are good as deterrent. Fines should always go back to the public--they should never become state revenue. This breaks the incentives.

Replace all fines (and most jail time) with community service, defined as something like "hours signed off by the director of any 501(c)(3)." Cut government programs that are now unnecessary because of all the community service.

The supply of community service hours is decentralized and 501(c)(3) organizations have limited input into law enforcement, so the government has less incentive to increase non-compliance to increase citations.

Also fun to see the entire C-suite of a company get 1000 hours of community service each instead of a fine paid by shareholders whose only mistake was hiring them.

If you wanted to try to design a system to let nepo-babies get out of any crime short of a felony with zero punishment it would be hard to imagine a system better than that.

I can form a 501c3 today, and as long as it doesn't funnel earnings to an individual (other than a very lavish salary) I could let people 'donate' their time at one of my community service parties, pay me a small fee, and issue a small donation to some local cause.

I'd hope that services are mostly paid for by taxes or user fees rather than fines.

No, budgets get rearranged to put the money towards other items when certain items can pay for themselves like this. There's only so much money raised via taxes. Income via fines is an unlimited well to be tapped by those with the creativity to find them

"Inflation reduction"

> A large portion of the money collected should go to a department whose goal is to find further ways to discourage the problematic behaviour.

Then how will they be able to milk the citizens for millions a year? It's in their best interest to keep everything as confusing as possible so they can trap as many people as they can.

Goodhart's law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

#3 place, 44 Court St., is directly opposite Brooklyn Borough Hall and the Kings County Supreme Court.

A friend of mine who had been a reporter for the NYT told me it was official policy that all reporters' parking fines would be paid by the newspaper if there wasn't a free space anywhere otherwise -- to never miss a story because of parking.

So that doesn't surprise me at all.

EDIT: see my response below, I forgot it was a general rule but I think fire hydrants were an exception because of safety. So probably not applying here at all, sorry

That's a cool story and connection to the article, thanks for sharing!

Similarly, I know several plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs etc. who consider what I see as eye watering stacks of parking tickets to be just an ordinary cost of doing business in NYC.

This is the basic problem with the "cars are bad, make things bad for cars" urban designs. Sometimes you need a car, because you've got a carload of heavy equipment you need to bring to a job in the city and you can't carry it on the subway. But then there's nowhere to legally park at the job site, and you still have a carload of heavy equipment and you can't carry it all several blocks to the nearest available parking structure.

Parking fines become a cost of doing business because there are no practical alternatives.

Ironically I believe you may be missing the true point you're making - the reason why there's no parking for commercial vehicles who need to be in that area, is that the streets are absolutely just chock full of various individuals' private property - street parked cars. If you got rid of those street parking spots for individuals, (IE, 'cars are bad make things harder for cars') there would be plenty of space for commercial vehicles to do their jobs, and the problem we're discussing would be solved.

A great solution to this sort of thing is common in the rest of the world, pedestrian-first streets that are permeable to vehicular traffic, offer unstructured temporary parking for necessary uses but does not offer structured overnight street parking for individuals and have a ~15mph limit. Perfect for getting the plumber's van to the front door of properties on such a street.

Here's a random example in Innsbruck, Austria, note how much room there is to park contractor vans in front of the various adjacent buildings: https://maps.app.goo.gl/m2e7AmWFr8hqw9BC9?g_st=ic

Now, that street is at the maximalist end of this idea, on most NYC streets you could delete maybe 25% of the street parking for individuals and there'd be plenty of room for plumbers. Also for garbage collection units (to address the rat problem), bicycle parking, al fresco dining, etc.

The urbanist philosophy you are denigrating isn't that cars are 'bad.' The idea is that they're fine in many contexts, they're just wildly inefficient when being used by too many individual persons in a dense urban environment, such as most of NYC.

I would also add along these lines - the changes you perceive as purely punitive to drivers probably make life better for everyone in the city, with a cost to only (some) drivers. Something to think about.

> Perfect for getting the plumber's van to the front door of properties on such a street.

Not exactly. If the speed limit is so low and the path is full of pedestrians, getting there will take a lot longer. Then you're paying a skilled worker to spend more time driving and less time working, on the way in and the way out, to each job multiple times a day.

Not parking in a parking structure several blocks away isn't infeasible because it's physically impossible to put a job box on wheels and lug it down the street, it's infeasible because you can't get it there in a timely manner, which is exactly what this hasn't solved.

And you have a nice idyllic picture of the lone van, but in practice a city block full of skyscrapers will have plumbers and electricians and HVAC technicians and IT staff carrying in computers and things, delivery trucks for everything from packages of dog food and copier paper to appliances to restocking convenience stores and vending machines.

That's what the parking spaces are for, and they're already scarce before you remove any.

What you do to solve that problem is you cross those ped oriented thoroughfares with some higher capacity auto roads, so that the plumber doesn't have to make a long trip from the high capacity road to the property on the low capacity one - instead most of their journey is on parallel roadways and they can turn onto a ped superhighway at the last possible moment. Classic road hierarchy design stuff, just one more level of abstraction down than mostly currently in place in NY. It works fine in European supercities, Tokyo is also a good example.

Also, the plumber won't always be making calls to pedestrian superpaths. Keep in mind how I pointed out that a wide 15mph pedestrian superhighway as described is a maximalist idea - but there are many equally maximalist auto superhighways in the city aren't there? (A key difference being no one wants to live near those) In much the same way as smaller auto roads are more permeable to peds than superhighways, smaller ped oriented roads can be more auto-permeable, with say a 25mph limit and limited street parking. This should constitute the bulk of the city. Then finally at the other end of the scale you have the 35mph avenue/boulevard, then the 45mph auto road, then the 65mph superhighway. They can all live in harmony servicing different kinds of traffic at different speeds, a diverse set of path weights creating beautiful overlays of separate cycle, pedestrian, and road traffic networks, something the Netherlands is really good at in particular.

New York is not all skyscrapers - sort of the opposite actually by land area and population. (Approximately 78 percent of New Yorkers do not live in Manhattan) I live in a part of Brooklyn, where there is certifiably plenty of street parking, I never have trouble finding a spot in front of my place. There's a street nearby maybe 5 minutes walk away where I park when I'm pulling a trailer because there's always enough room for it. That street is where tractor trailers park with 53 foot trailers too - if multiple 53 foot trailers can legally park next to my vehicle with a jet ski on a trailer, next to a public park, that is not a scarcity of parking in my eyes. Keep in mind it is these kinds of predominantly residential medium density places, where most people live, where I want to delete parking spaces. Skyscrapers are just not relevant to the urban environment where most people live in NYC. For example it's perhaps a 40 minute walk to the nearest skyscrapers for me, and I'm not even that far out into Brooklyn.

In Manhattan where the very tallest skyscrapers are? That's a whole other ballgame of scale, I agree. It's just the top of the density pyramid of the overall city though and thus occupies a relatively small overall area of it -- I don't think our citywide urbanist strategies should revolve solely around this area - it requires distinct strategies for the absolutely densest core to keep things moving. It should all just be commercial parking only basically. That's hard to actually enforce in practice, so I think the best strategy is to do a congestion charge set at the right level to reduce the number of single occupant commuter type vehicles in the area and correctly price in that cost of doing business in the densest part of the urban core as a charge rather than a fine. As a bonus traffic should improve as well - I'm eager to see what the upcoming lower Manhattan congestion charge pilot does for my blood pressure when crossing Manhattan in a vehicle using Canal street.

> but there are many equally maximalist auto superhighways in the city aren't there?

I don't know about that. Most city highways in the US have a speed limit of 50-55 MPH or less. It's certainly possible to construct roads that allow for higher speeds. Germany has many highways with no formal speed limit and a limit by gentleman's agreement of around triple that.

No one wants to have that literally in their front yard, but many people find it convenient to live within a few blocks of it, and the directly adjacent land is suitable for things like industry and warehouses and high voltage lines and railways, which all have to be somewhere.

> if multiple 53 foot trailers can legally park next to my vehicle with a jet ski on a trailer, next to a public park, that is not a scarcity of parking in my eyes.

Neither is that the place where contractors are racking up parking tickets.

> It should all just be commercial parking only basically.

That doesn't quite work though, does it? Suppose you live there and you're taking home a new kitchen sink from the hardware store, or literally any other heavy object you have to get from wherever it is now to your residence or vice versa. It's not about whether the vehicle is a truck, it's about whether what's in it is too much to carry long distances on foot.

> I think the best strategy is to do a congestion charge

Which then itself becomes a cost of doing business for anyone who can't avoid it, so it gets priced into the cost of trade services etc. even when the customer isn't rich.

Socially it's always better to reduce scarcity than extract rents from it.

> pedestrian superpaths

The reason there is resistance to this is that cars are heavy, so the best place for them is on the ground where you don't need expensive structural support. Whereas pedestrians are light, so you can build pedestrian spaces vertically at much lower expense. Which means there is much more constraint on the space that can be allocated to cars, whereas if you want more space for pedestrians, you can build taller buildings. Which in turn means it makes sense to use the ground level space for the things that it costs more to put higher up.

And if you want pedestrian spaces outside, put them above the road. Build balconies that overhang the street with pedestrian bridges to other buildings at the level of the second story. Have your al fresco dining on the roof -- the view is better from there anyway.

I hope the story was lost in translation or surely doesn’t apply to fire hydrant fines.

If not, seems very unethical -> see fire, park in front of hydrant to get the story, impede fire department fighting the fire

You know, come to think of it I think they did actually say that fire hydrants were the only not-OK parking fine for that very reason, I forgot that part. So maybe that's not the reason at all then... never mind. :S

I imagine for every reporter, there’s a dozen “upstanding citizens” breaking the law immediately before their court date.

The data is from 2013-2014.

"The annualized total of all Fire Hydrant parking fines? $55 million."

Not sure how much of $11B NYPD budget is allocated for parking fine enforcement, but I suppose $55 million will more than cover it.

> Not sure how much of $11B NYPD budget is allocated for parking fine enforcement,

The NYPD notoriously not only refuses to enforce most parking violations, but is actually the largest source of illegal parking violations themselves. There's even an official card for it[0]. This has been a known and documented problem for years, but the NYPD has successfully resisted any attempt at oversight.

It's one of the reasons that the new law against idling allows citizens to report it themselves without requiring a cop to issue a ticket.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/nypd-courtesy-card-police-miscond...

And do they collect cash from all fines or are they just issued and only some collected?

Dummies. In my country there is magic spell: "it's only for three minutes", in Italy they use "park anywhere" magic button (emergency lights). Don't believe there is nothing like this in US.

Pfft. In NYC if you know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy in NYPD, you can get a "courtesy card" you can present to an officer to get out of all sorts of shit https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-court... You can even buy them online.

I wonder how many cops are corrupt only because the found themselves in a department that already seemed irreparably corrupt.

(I don't mean that it's a sufficient cause for a given cop becoming corrupt. Just cases where it was the deciding factor.)

In NYC, you just buddy up with a policeman, abuse official vehicles and or place a vest, placard, note, or something vaguely cop-like on your dashboard and you’re fine! You can also get a fake temporary New Jersey license plate if you’re feeling lucky, but the NYS police or bridge police may pull you over.

My favorites for the first type is a deputy fire chief from a Long Island volunteer department who works construction and just double parks the department SUV in front of the site.

My favorite was watching a moving van pull up in front of a hydrant, then put an empty moving box on top of the hydrant, and stack another couple on top to complete the illusion.

Now that's some out-of-the-box thinking.

Sounds more like in-the-box to be precise.

Sneak 100 as they say. Reminds me of Crosby’s parking monologue.

That’s inspiring.

Ingenious!

It's the sort of expertise you pay for when hiring a professional instead of doing it yourself.

I think a lot of the people getting these tickets would happily pay them in order to get the better spot. Plus there's all that stuff about diplomats just parking wherever they want because they don't have to pay tickets but that might've been fixed.

I have a friend who travels to the local downtown area (not New York) semi-frequently. He did the math and it turned out to be cheaper to accept and pay the occasional parking ticket than to pay the parking meter every time. So he just doesn't feed the meter. Apparently he only gets a ticket once every few years on average.

I couldn't do it because getting slapped with a fine would cause an anxiety flare-up even when I knew the consequences beforehand. (And also I have worse luck than other people and can prove it with math!)

I tried this a bunch of years back, though across the river in Jersey City. I moved to a building that was an enclave of sorts that had zero street parking. You could of course pay for the garage to the tune of ~150 a month at the time. I had a motorcycle, and realized that I could park it across the street from my office building a few blocks away, and a ticket for street cleaning was $20. They would ticket me every other week, so $40/month in total. I guess someone got sick of my shenanigans despite me paying the tickets off promptly each time I received one, and one day my bike was taken to bike jail. Maybe some tickets blew off, but I think they were just done with me, and it cost me $500 to get it back. I sold the bike shortly after, I had acquired a serious girlfriend, and was using it for trips home and to the beach (both about 30 miles away), and there was no way I was going to make her sit on the back of a crotch rocket that long.

However, I did pull a similar stunt in lower Manhattan for awhile too, though I moved my bike on street cleaning days- though to another illegal spot by my office building- at that point I was living in Battery Park and my office was right off the west side highway in Tribeca, and I never had a single issue doing that.

Just hope you don’t end up like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk6xz4EmXBk

just because they can't arrest you doesn't mean they can't tow the car (not legal advice, not sure if this is an act of war or not)

In my experience in college where some diplomat's kid would illegally park his car almost every day, they will tow the car but the embassy will go pick it up and pay the fine so it didn't really matter to them.

NYPD has a lot of officers, I bet they could take a couple countries.

Premium parking.

The US has "I'm totally not here" lights, but I'm guessing the NYPD is hardened against them.

Ha, in RO it's 5 mins. We win. And yes, they leave it with emergency lights too.

>use "park anywhere" magic button (emergency lights).

Great way of attracting attention to yourself.

This is the fire hydrant in question: https://goo.gl/maps/5C983vRcHCW6Zaq5A

Currently there's construction there so probably the fines are reduced.

Doesn't appear to be any particularly obvious reason this would be a big problem.

Edit: Actually looks like they repainted the lines there in between Aug 2013 and Oct 2014 which makes it much more clear.

Here's 2013: https://goo.gl/maps/NF3xguY2P6FX4JUX7 And 2014: https://goo.gl/maps/Bk6W8bqndCb1Zjvd7

I love how there's a car there in the 2013 shot that likely received a fine.

15 feet. Multiple reasons given here:

https://www.quora.com/Why-do-firefighters-need-15-feet-of-sp...

https://archive.ph/ELmoa

It depends on how accessible to fire trucks that lane is between the cars and the hydrant. If it's a pain for trucks to get in there, they probably usually opt to park in the middle of the street and run the hoses past the cars to the hydrant.

Not sure why people are throwing a fit. Space is marked out with lines. Fire hydrant in clear view. I mean it’s painted a non standard color, but it’s clearly a fire hydrant.

$33K per year in 2013 is just a tax on idiots.

For a lot of vehicle owners, parking tickets in NYC are not an unfortunate event but just a cost of doing business. In my Brooklyn neighborhood, its cheaper to get one or two parking tickets a month than to rent a garage space.

Its kind of a wager, will I pay more in fines or parking garage fees.

For a lot of delivery businesses, its really part of their business model. They know they're getting X amount of fines per month; they bake that into their costs.

Sounds like the price of a ticket should be made dependent on how many other tickets were received. Repeat offenders should have to pay more per incident.

I would 100% support that.

Look at the sibling comment. In 2013 it wasn't painted clearly. I imagine now that it's painted clearly, this hydrant is no longer raking in the same amount of fines.

No wonder people have to park in front of the hydrant there, there is absolutely no parking on that street

doesn't the fire department connect the hydrant to a pump truck and feed hoses that way rather than connecting hoses directly to the hydrant to fight the fires? kind of hard to park a truck where you're proposing to rotate the hydrant

I guess they could double park and use feed hoses that can tolerate a relatively tight bend?

Were I'm coming from: When a problem keeps happening over and over and over again because it's next to impossible to train 100% of the population to follow every rule to the letter, you work around the problem using design and technology. You don't use fines to create a revenue source.

If you look at 2013 Google Maps, it’s no wonder 152 Forsyth was first place. There’s drawn lines for parking and the fire hydrant is several feet away and inconspicuously painted black. I think I would’ve parked there too thinking I was far enough away from the hydrant. By 2014 they fixed this by painting it as no parking. Got plenty of income though leaving it like that for years.

The black paint is just what fire hydrants in that part of the city look like. There are very few yellow/red fire hydrants in Manhattan.

The reality is that that amount of money probably barely covers the return on the value of such a piece of prime real estate in Manhattan.

The solution is easy, get rid of on street parking, use the space for pedestrians, bikes and shops, cafes and restaurants. Why should the public pay for people's ability to put their space wasters somewhere and they even complain about getting fines for obstructing emergency services.

Before someone chimes in with "but you need a car to get around...", we are talking about Manhattan here not somewhere in the Apalachians.

I'm reminded that my city used to have red-light cameras on major intersections. Each year the local newspaper would publish a list of intersections with the most red-light violations, and each year the list was almost identical to the previous year. The newspaper article was always presented as support for the red-light cameras ("Look at all these bad drivers we're catching!"), but in my mind, it was just the opposite. First, if people keep running the same red-lights in the same intersections at the same rate, then red-light cameras as a deterrent isn't working. Second, and most important, why not just fix the god damn intersections so people don't feel the need to run the red-lights? ... But then I remembered this scene from "The Jerk", an old Steve Martin movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meBXuuy9xto

Amusing coincidence the second one (~$25k /yr) on the list has a violator in the google street view: https://goo.gl/maps/p26casEqnKVCw2BK8

image: https://capture.dropbox.com/UyeMpFCv6xuitWlB

This is pretty deceptive. The curb is painted white and the hydrant is not even near the street and it's not painted in a red color.

I can see being in a hurry and not realizing that you can't park here. Definitely scammy.

Can we get a (2014) in the title?

This is basically why we need a separation of ability to fine and fine income, otherwise the abuse will always trend towards very high.

"Annualized", got it. Thought it has to be two hundred a ticket at the minimum to net that much of revenue a year.

It’s $115/ticket according to https://www.nyc.gov/site/finance/vehicles/services-violation... (look up code 40).

And are these tickets issued or tickets actually paid? I can imagine a lot of people just toss the ticket and hope for the best.

If you fail to pay the ticket they can

-block you from renewing vehicle registration (if registered in NY, not sure about other states)

-incapacitate your vehicle with a boot

-tow your vehicle

The only time you could maybe get away with tossing the ticket is if you visit NY from another state in a non rental vehicle and do not plan to return. This is going to be a low percentage of vehicles.

In many East Coast cities, the expected cost of a parking ticket is much lower than the guaranteed cost of garage parking. Fines have not kept pace with inflation at all.

In NYC, parking tickets cost $45-125. Fire hydrant violations are at the upper end of that range. But when garage parking is $10-20 an hour, rolling the dice on the fine is the economically rational behavior. Yes, this is sociopathic when you apply it to fire hydrants, but NYC drivers are sociopaths.

They ought to add a zero to all those fines and start heavily using the carrot to discourage driving. But the thing is, the city quite likes the status quo. If those fines were more of a deterrent, the city would get less revenue. The fines need to be low enough not to actually discourage the antisocial behavior. Isn’t neoliberalism awesome?

Great work! Should recoup about 0.000001% of the negative externalities cars produce in NYC.