A professor at the Pratt Institute who harnesses publicly available data to address urban-planning questions has discovered that the New York Police Department (NYPD) wrote more than $19,000 in tickets for a legal parking space in Battery Park City.
Ben Wellington, who teaches at Pratt’s Graduate Center for Planning and also writes the I Quant NY urban planning blog, discovered that this error was part of a larger, systematic pattern in which NYPD wrote millions of dollars of tickets in the last two and a half years for cars that were legally parked. The problem stems from a 2009 change in parking regulations, which made it legal for the first time to park in front of curb cuts (the dips in sidewalks and curbs that connect to an adjoining street, making it easier for wheelchairs, baby carriages, and disabled pedestrians to cross) provided there was not a crosswalk attached to the curb cut.
Exactly such a curb cut exists on the north side of Chambers Street, slightly to the west of the main entrance to Stuyvesant High School. At this location, the curb dips, but there is not painted crosswalk connecting to it. (Complicating matters is that the area surrounding the curb cut has been painted yellow, but such markings are legally meaningless in New York City parking enforcement.) Under the 2009 regulation, it thus became legal to park there. The problem is that nobody seems to have told the NYPD, or any of the dozen or so other City agencies that are authorized to write parking tickets.
Using the City’s Open Data portal, Professor Wellington was able to look at all of the locations in the City where cars were repeatedly ticketed for parking at curb cuts. Many of these spaces have crosswalks attached, which means that the violations issued by the police were legitimate. But hundreds of these spaces do not have a crosswalk, which means that every summons issued for parking there was invalid on its face.
Professor Wellington then isolated this subset of spaces alongside curb cuts that had no crosswalk, and ranked them by the number of tickets each had generated. He found that the space at the curb cut on Chambers Street has the sixteenth highest incidence of this type of summonses for the City as a whole, and is ranked number one for all of Manhattan. In the past 30 months (the period covered by the City’s Open Data program), it has generated 116 tickets with a value of $19,140.
He then reached out to the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics and the office of Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer (who has been a persistent advocate for the Open Data program), who referred him to the police department. An NYPD spokesman later wrote to him that, “Mr. Wellington’s analysis identified errors the Department made in issuing parking summonses. It appears to be a misunderstanding by officers on patrol of a recent, abstruse change in the parking rules. We appreciate Mr. Wellington bringing this anomaly to our attention.” The NYPD promised to conduct new training that will clarify for officers the 2009 rule change, and added, “thanks to this analysis and the availability of this open data, the department is also taking steps to digitally monitor these types of summonses to ensure that they are being issued correctly.”
As a delighted Professor Wellington wrote in his I Quant NY blog, “I was speechless. This is what the future of government could look like one day. This is what Open Data is all about. This was coming from the NYPD — not generally celebrated for its transparency — and yet it’s the most open and honest response I have received from any New York City agency to date. Imagine a city where all agencies embrace this sort of analysis instead of [trying to] deflect and hide from it.”
“Democracies provide pathways for government to learn from their citizens,” he continued. “Open Data makes those pathways so much more powerful. In this case, the NYPD acknowledged the mistake, is retraining its officers and is putting in monitoring to limit this type of erroneous ticketing from happening in the future. In doing so, they have shown that they are ready and willing to work with the people of the City. And what better gift can we get from Open Data than that?”
While the overall lesson from this episode may be positive, local residents might find the particulars especially galling. Battery Park City is, in statistical terms, the most parking-deprived community in the five boroughs of New York City. With a residential population of more than 13,000 (and another 10,000 reporting here for work each day), it has just 201 parking spaces available to the public, of which 58 are metered and 143 are unregulated, except by alternate-side parking rules. (These figures come from a report by the City’s Department of Transportation issued in 2008, the last year for which detailed numbers are available.) While there is ample curb space within the community’s 92 acres (enough for more than 1,600 parking spaces), 59 percent of it falls within zones that are signed “no standing” (785 spaces) and “no parking” (581 spaces). Much of the rest is set aside for commercial vehicles, buses, and vehicles displaying government placards.
Making matters worse, as many as half of these spaces that remain are commandeered each day by police officers and other government officials displaying credentials that effectively make them immune from parking tickets. This problem became worse in 2014 when the New York Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Strike Force (an arm of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration) rented 56,000 square feet of office space at Brookfield Place. This unit brings more than 250 law enforcement personnel from a dozen-plus agencies (including the NYPD, the FBI, the DEA, Customs, United States Secret Service, the New York State Police, the New York City Department of Correction, and the New York State Division of Parole) to Battery Park City each day. Because the cars they use for undercover work need to be concealed, these are parked in 130 garage spaces within 250 Vesey Street. That means, however, that the personal vehicles these officers and agents take to and from work are almost invariably parked on the streets nearby.