Bloomberg Finally Cracks Down On Parking Permit Abuse

I know the Mayor has been busy not running for President in the last few months so it has been hard tending to the city. However, he finally got to business on one of the city's longstanding ills.

From The Gothamist:

Mayor Bloomberg has announced that the city will crackdown on the abuse of parking permits issued to civil servants, reducing the overall number by 20%. The change comes after the Post revealed in November that “149 separate government entities had qualified for the coveted placards last year, ranging from the state lottery to the US Navy recruiting office, which was allocated an astonishing 110 permits.”

In fact, so many agencies produce and distribute the parking placards that the city has no idea how many are out there! The mayor's office guesstimates 70,000, but Transportation Alternatives, who run a website that posts photos of illegally parked cars with permits, says 150,000 is more like it because of all the counterfeit and expired placards out there.[...]

The new plan, intended to cut congestion and pollution as well as corruption, goes like this:

• Every city agency is to conduct an inventory of its permits and reduce them by 20%. This would eliminate roughly 14,000.
  
• They must stop issuing new ones as of March 1st. (Less than eight weeks to call in a favor to your buddy at the Navy recruiting office.)
  
• As of March 1st only the Police Department and the Department of Transportation will have the authority to issue the coveted parking placards.
  
• A multi-agency working group will implement and coordinate the various measures.
  
• The NYPD will create a new enforcement unit to ensure compliance and agencies will develop enforcement procedures to prevent the abuse of placards.

Now here is where change gets tricky, all of these new rules apply to the NYPD and they love their parking perks. Many officers are up in arms over this despite keeping the ability to issue the permits. Streetsblog found this rant indicative of what may ensue from all of this. Personally, those bastards can kiss my you know what. Also, they should re-arrange some funds by making the ticket-nazis (you know who I'm talking about) police the permit abusers instead of acting as blood-suckers to ordinary cars.