Officials are now admitting what we’ve known for eons: Two years after Mayor Bill de Blasio vowed to address rampant parking-placard abuse by municipal employees, the city has done next to nothing to crack down.
No shocker there. De Blasio has never cared about stopping insider abuses, only about pretending to care.
Back in February 2019, his team pitched digital stickers as a way to stop holders from switching placards from car to car. But that’s done little because the city Department of Transportation has issued decals to just 1,700 drivers — out of 125,000-plus placards in circulation.
The same month, Hizzoner promised to yank all of the placards from city employees who abused them. But as of September 2020, the City Council’s 311 Placard Complaints Map showed more than 7,500 hotline calls reporting abuses, but more than two-thirds of those were marked as ignored — and only two people had their placards pulled.
That’s not all that’s failed: De Blasio’s plan to “phase out placards as we know them entirely by 2021” and move to a digital “pay-by-plate” parking system also remains in park. And his vow to have his office’s Street Conditions Observation Unit do a survey on placard abuse last year also went off the road.
De Blasio took office promising to change the Tale of Two New Yorks. Instead, he’s turned it into a tale of the connected vs. everyone else.