Community Board 1 (CB1) is pushing the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio to close a legal loophole so obscure that it confuses even police. The technicality is centered on 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) at t-intersections, where one road dead-ends into a perpendicular street. While it is ordinarily illegal to park in front of a curb cut, this prohibition was, in 2009, removed from curb cuts at T-intersections—provided there was not a stop sign, traffic light, or painted crosswalk at the same location.
The City’s Department of Transportation (DOT) calls curb cuts, “a critical component in providing for safe and accessible means of travel” while the office of Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer says, “when a [curb cut] is missing, blocked, in disrepair, or improperly constructed, residents with disabilities cannot fully participate in many activities and opportunities for enrichment that other New Yorkers take for granted.”
But, as a resolution enacted at CB1’s February 23 meeting notes, “New York City traffic rules allow parking at some T-intersections—those without traffic signals, all-way stop signs or crosswalk markings—even if there is a curb cut at that location.” The resolution also observes that, “painted crosswalks are not typically placed at curb cuts located at T-intersections, which means that drivers are not alerted that a pedestrian crossing is present, even though a child or wheelchair user at the bottom of a curb cut is too short to see or to be seen by drivers due to parked vehicles that block sight lines.”
Earlier in February, Jennifer Sta. Ines, the DOT’s Deputy Manhattan Borough Commissioner, confirmed that the agency’s policy is not to install painted crosswalks at locations at which there is no traffic signal or stop sign.
All of these conditions converge in Battery Park City, at the T-intersection of North End Avenue and Chambers Street, where 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 a 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 change in regulations, 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.
Ben Wellington, a professor at the Pratt Institute who harnesses publicly available data to address urban-planning questions, discovered in 2016 that the New York Police Department (NYPD) wrote more than $19,000 in tickets to cars parked in this counter-intuitively legal space. Professor 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 over the 30-month period for cars that were legally parked.
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 at one of these was invalid on its face.
Professor Wellington then isolated this subset of spaces alongside curb cuts that had no crosswalk, ranked them by the number of tickets each had generated. He found that the space at the curb cut on Chambers Street had the sixteenth-highest incidence of this type of summons for the City as a whole, and was ranked number one for all of Manhattan. In the previous 30 months (the period covered by the City’s Open Data program), it generated 116 tickets with a value of $19,140.
He then reached out to the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, as well as to the office of Ms. Brewer (a persistent advocate for the Open Data program), both of whom 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 to 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?”
CB1’s February resolution notes that, “changes to laws and regulations to make it illegal to block any portion of a curb cut and to mandate painted crosswalks at all curb cuts would be low-cost ways to further Vision Zero,” a de Blasio-administration initiative that aims to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries arising from road traffic.
The resolution concludes that CB1, “demands the DOT change traffic rules and parking regulations so that blocking any portion of a curb cut is illegal, including with a City-issued placard or by a City-owned vehicle,” and insists that, “DOT paint crosswalks at every curb cut.”
Matthew Fenton
