Muni Meter Meltdown

NY City continues its assault on its citizens by adding hidden taxes.

I guess it's not completely taxation without representation but have you noticed how many additional costs the residents of NYC are incurring since the financial collapse.   One day its higher subway fares coupled with service cuts and route cancellations while the next day they raise water-rates and  then its property taxes.   I've seen a ticket blitz for garbage left out on the wrong day, improperly displayed vehicle registration stickers and minor restaurant violations and it's not just the city, the State just made it mandatory to get the new $25 NY State license plates.

Unlike mass transit where they raise your rates while they cut your service the newest revenue stream comes with a slight quality-of-life boots.  What I've noticed recently is that they are installing mini-meters everywhere to replace the old knob-turning ones and in general this is a positive step since it does open up more parking spots and makes parking easier since you can pay for a credit card which means you don't have to have 12 quarters with you to park in NYC for 2 hours.    I don't have any issue with paying for parking on mainly commercial streets but what they have been doing recently is attacking the people who live in the neighborhood.   Just yesterday I noticed that a certain area around the corner from our apartment had been converted from normal residential parking to a muni-meter and what this did was two-fold.  

·         One it will make parking that much more difficult as it will eliminate about 10 good residential spots all while the city continues to zone for large condo-buildings to be built in the area which will only add more cars to the neighborhood.    You can't just keep adding people to neighborhoods and not taking any consideration what you are doing to the infrastructure.   The subway platforms, parking spaces and parks were all designed for much smaller groups of people in mind.    For example it is not uncommon for a kid to have to wait 10 minutes to use the swings at the local park.

·         The second thing they did was worse.  From what I can tell they added these mini-meters without any warning.   From what I can tell they added the new muni-meters and new street regulations yesterday morning and later that evening there was literally a ticket on every single car on that particular block.   These were probably cars that were parked completely legally earlier that day but all of a sudden they changed the rules and obviously none of the cars had the little parking-slips displayed on their dashboards.   Now I wasn't directly affected so I guess I shouldn't spend too much of my time complaining but there should be some kind of grace-period.  If a certain street is zoned in one way for 10 years it seems ridiculous that you can add a muni-meter and a new sign at 9AM that day and ticket people as soon as it's up.   There were no flyers handed out, signs posted or anything, just ten cars with 10 tickets which are probably $55 a piece.

I'm convinced that parking meters are not set up with the thought of collecting $0.25 for 15 minutes but are actually just traps set up to catch people who overstay their time by a few minutes.   I'd love to look but I'm sure the revenue that the city makes on parking-meter tickets dwarfs that of actual parking meter collection.