With Cars Snowed In, Drivers Lament Tickets

New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended the city’s decision not to suspend its alternate-side-of-the-street parking rules even after some residents complained that their cars were ticketed for illegal parking when snow plows left them buried in mounds of snow and unable to be moved.

New Yorkers complained that their cars were ticketed for illegal parking today when they were buried in snow.

The mayor said that the city’s biggest priority was to clear the streets.

“We want to get the snow and the ice off the roads as quickly as possible so that emergency vehicles can get through, so that you can get to work, so that the kids can get to school,” the mayor said today. “We’ll all do it together, rather than griping. We’ll be better off.”

But asking New Yorkers not to gripe about anything was like asking for mayonnaise on a pastrami sandwich. Highly unlikely.

Angry residents called the city’s complaint line, 311, to gripe about the tickets. They called their local television stations. They wailed on blogs.

“Give us a break Mike,” a reader named Chris wrote to The New York Times’s Empire Zone blog, saying he thought the mayor was less interested in plowing the streets than he was in not interrupting the revenue flow from the pricey parking tickets.

The National Weather Service said the season’s first real snow storm dumped about two inches of snow in Central Park, and it turned to hard ice by morning. Overnight, the Sanitation Department began dispatching 1,500 plows and trucks to spread salt and clear streets, and their work left thousands of cars buried like shrimp in a deep bowl of ice.

Then, as if adding insult to injury, the traffic enforcement people came by and left red parking violation tickets on the windshields. NY1 News videotaped the scene in the Village this morning.

One angry Brooklyn resident told the Empire Zone that the snow plows came through her neighborhood last night and cleared the streets.

“The result is a row of cars trapped on the sidelines by snow drifts,” said the blogger, who signed her name as Angela. “I don’t own a shovel and I was unable to move my car today. Sure enough, my car and several others were issued parking violations. What is truly absurd is that there is still so much snow on the sides of the streets that the cleaning truck would be useless even if we were able to get our cars out of the way. It’s just another example of choosing revenue over common sense.”

But the mayor, who was visiting sanitation workers today in Woodside, Queens, to thank them for their work, said he did not believe the city’s traffic enforcement police issued that many tickets to cars that ended up on the wrong side today after the storm. He said the good news was that all of the city’s streets had been plowed at least once so far.

Residents pointed out that alternate street parking, a practice that is quintessentially New York, but similar to parking rules in other big cities, has been suspended in the past after other snow storms.

The parking rules mean that cars cannot be left parked on one side of the street indefinitely, but must be moved to the other side every other day or so, to allow street cleaning trucks or other city vehicles to access one side or the other.

The custom, which has been lampooned in such places as the television show “Seinfeld,” means residents who park their cars on the street must rise before a certain hour every day to move their cars to the opposite side before the ticket-dispensing officers swoop in, as they inevitably do.

Another reader told the Empire Zone:

“My friend from Jamaica, Queens, was unable to move her car to the right side because it was stuck in an ice drift,” said Andrea Goldberg, explaining that the friend sat in her car for an hour and a half waiting.

“Neither a street cleaning vehicle, nor a snow plow passed by,” she said. “There were no spots available on the right side of the street, since nobody had moved out yesterday; all those care were also iced in. What a waste of gas and energy.”

But another reader from Boston seemed fed up with the complaining New Yorkers:

“We all own shovels, and we all dig our cars out of massive snowdrifts every time it snows often multiple times,” wrote Bob. “And sometimes we have to shovel out new spaces when we need to park. Getting plowed in and shoveling are facts of life when it snows.”