{"id":199318,"date":"2025-09-04T10:38:31","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T10:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/199318\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T10:38:31","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T10:38:31","slug":"nycs-next-parking-violations-scandal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/199318\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC\u2019s next parking violations scandal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seeing the orange-and-white envelope sticking from my car\u2019s windshield almost sent me into a rage. I had just come out of a lunch with a client and her friend and was about to give them a lift downtown.<\/p>\n

Then I almost screamed, but instead muttered, \u201cHow could the [bleeping] traffic agent be so [bleeping] stupid? I just got a parking ticket for not displaying a receipt in my windshield!\u201d<\/p>\n

Couldn\u2019t he see I was parked right next to a new Muni Meter machine<\/a>? All it requires is that drivers input their license plate number \u2014 and specifically says there\u2019s no need to display a receipt on the dashboard.<\/p>\n

My brain did a quick calculation: how long would it take me to assemble the necessary evidence and challenge the ticket? I\u2019d need a photo of the Muni Meter and a copy of my American Express statement<\/a> showing the charge. Uploading those to the Department of Finance\u2019s website<\/a> would take 15 minutes, max. So, I decided to fight it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s when I fell into the Alice-in-Wonderland abyss of NYC\u2019s bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

I sent in the evidence, waited several weeks, and then got an email: Guilty! An administrative law judge (ALJ) had reviewed my photos and scans and wrote a decision \u2014 replete with more typos than a C-minus student\u2019s text to a BFF \u2014 that was shocking not for its brevity but its errors.<\/p>\n

The most basic was the assertion that the photo didn\u2019t identify the meter. Wrong. The photo included both the meter and the zone number. And the American Express statement \u2014 which he didn\u2019t like either \u2014 showed a $13.25 payment on the same date as the ticket \u2014 to NYC and the exact same \u201cMeter Zone\u201d as on the machine. Huh?<\/p>\n

There was one other reference on the decision which made no sense to me: \u201cFlowbird<\/a> records are reviewed and considered Guilty.\u201d What in the world is Flowbird, I wondered. I\u2019d find out a month later.<\/p>\n

New York City has some 80,000 on-street metered parking spaces. To service those spots, the city has approximately 14,500 Muni Meters. And since May 2024, it has been replacing older meters that were first put in place in 1989 \u2014 following the city\u2019s notorious Parking Violations Bureau scandal of 1986<\/a> that shook up the Koch administration.<\/p>\n

The ostensible purpose of the new machines, which use what is known as pay-by-plate technology, is to save the estimated 2,500 miles of paper annually needed for the receipts that go onto car windshields proving the driver has paid. And the new machines can work with a phone app provided by \u2014 wait for it \u2014 Flowbird.<\/p>\n

Giving out parking tickets for scofflaws who fail to pay is a big business. The NYPD employs some 3,300 traffic enforcement agents who write more than 1.2 million tickets (at around $65 each) annually for no-receipts; and another 1.9 million for street cleaning violations. Paying for those traffic enforcement agents is expensive: salaries \u2014 which start at $41,000 annually and rise to nearly $48,000 after one year on the job \u2014 and benefits cost the city about $247 million annually.<\/p>\n

Following my guilty verdict, I decided to appeal. For the appeal, I assembled even more evidence: a sworn, notarized affidavit from the client who saw me pay, and a new series of photos taken of the same machine\u2019s screen \u2014 at every step of the transaction. The last screen, about eight inches across and six inches high, says on a bright yellow background, \u201cNo need to display the receipt on dashboard.\u201d This was going to be my vindication \u2014 or so I thought.<\/p>\n

The panel of three appellate judges who I appeared before seemed unimpressed. I had to get on tip-toes to hand the photographs over a six-foot plexiglass divider to the presiding judge. And after another judge said, \u201cThe ALJ (the original judge) says he checked Flowbird and there is no record of your having paid,\u201d I had to explain that I didn\u2019t know what Flowbird was and didn\u2019t use it; I inserted my Amex into the new machine. The presiding judge explained I\u2019d get a written decision in about two weeks.<\/p>\n

I did, and I lost three-to-zero. \u201cWe find no reversible error of fact or law.\u201d That both the ticket and my American Express charge said Parking Zone 110517 apparently was insufficient. I paid the fine, but I keep wondering how many of those other 1.2 million Muni Meter ticket recipients were victims of errors. Did they have the good sense not to get swallowed up by the city bureaucracy? Or do they too wonder if this is just incompetence; or the latest iteration of a good old-fashioned parking scandal?<\/p>\n

Cohen is an attorney at Pollock Cohen<\/a> in NYC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Seeing the orange-and-white envelope sticking from my car\u2019s windshield almost sent me into a rage. I had just…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":199319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-199318","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-opinion","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-united-states-of-america","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","20":"tag-us","21":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115145598823758455","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}