I am poorer by $118 thanks to driving in Manhattan. That would be $115 in parking ticket for misreading the distant sign, and $3 for diligently feeding the parking meter – which conveniently will not indicate that I cannot park there during that time period. Having other cars parked in front of us certainly didn’t help ( I am sure they got their tickets as well) This is more that the cost of our entire trip from Boston to New York City – almost 400% more than the what we paid for gas for our 440 miles of driving from Boston to New York and back in our ten year old Honda Civic.
After being offered the fluorescent orange envelope, they are all I could see on other windshields for the rest of the trip. Just like you want to check out people’s shoes for the next few days after splurging on a new pair for oneself. If this is any consolation, I certainly had a lot of company and even tried to pay dues to my parking karma by alerting a driver that she is going to get a ticket if she parks there. With orange envelopes floating all around my head, I began wondering how much the city is making from parking tickets…and the number blew me away. According to a New York Times article by McGinty and Blumenthal in the fiscal year 2007-08 the city collected more than $624 million in parking fines !!! – more than the entire budget for the department of transportation from 2529 traffic agents half of whom write tickets.
If that is ‘collected’ fines, not everyone must have paid their dues…certainly not in this economy. Lets say we leave the uncollected fines for a rainy day and just focus on the reported amount. Let me infer some new numbers here. That would be almost 1265 agents writing tickets for $624 million. Which would be approximately $493,000 per agent. For a salary of less than $30,000 these agents bring in city revenue at more than 16 times their annual salary. Mayor Bloomberg certain knows a thing or two about productivity even when it comes at the cost of unwarranted personal misery for some.
Would it help if the city updates all the individual parking meters with clearly written signs that specifies when you cannot park ? It certainly will. But will the city do it? – I seriously doubt it. They might hire more agents though !!!
1 Comment
March 12, 2009 at 5:23 am
Yup, Ganesh, it’s unlikely there’ll be ‘full disclosure’ parking meters in NY any time soon. That’s like cell phone companies who charge you the peak time call charge for a 30 minute call started at 6.55pm. You think that at 7pm you’ll transfer to ‘free night and weekends’ but it doesn’t work like that.
I knew NYC makes a ton of money from parking tickets but had no idea this much