Ticket blitz? Police ask, what ticket blitz?

Tickets are popping up under windshields all over the area. Photo by Stefanie Campolo

By N. Clark Judd

Merchants and drivers in Riverdale and Kingsbridge say an ongoing city ticket blitz is bad for business - but the NYPD denies that there's a ticket blitz at all.

By the NYPD's count, the numbers of parking tickets given out this year are down by a sizeable margin across the city and a considerable one in the Bronx, with 874,541 tickets issued so far, compared with 905,428 during the same period in 2008 - 122,055 of those in the Bronx compared with 136,926 during the same period last year.

How is it possible to reconcile what many people say they see on the streets with the police's accounting? How do the numbers from the last two years match up with those over a longer period of time? A representative of the NYPD's Deputy Commissioner, Public Information says the police no longer have data from 2007, so they say there's no way of knowing.

Some in Riverdale and Kingsbridge say there's no way the numbers add up. There has been a steady stream of letters and phone calls coming into The Riverdale Press all summer, and it's easy to find complaints in shopping districts and wherever orange slips of paper appear unbidden on windshields.

Alan Kornblau, a co-owner of Kornblau Supply Co., a home improvement store in Kingsbridge, says this year and the last have come with a rain of tickets.

"It's getting worse," he said, later adding, "In the last two years … my own vehicles, my trucks got more tickets than we had in the last 10."

People on the other side of the Bronx have complained about a hail of parking summonses, too. The New York Daily News reported in late July that Castle Hill storeowners in the Bronx Merchants Coalition were more concerned about aggressive ticketing than any other single issue.

And the feeling of persecution extends from the apartments in Marble Hill to the busy shopping district on Johnson Avenue.

Rachmier Kavesh, a personal bodyguard waiting in a silver Mercedes on Johnson Avenue and West 235th Street on a recent Thursday, keeps rolls of quarters in his car at all times, because he's certain traffic enforcement agents will swoop down on him the minute his time expires.

On a recent day before the new Munimeter machines were installed in that area, he stopped his car alongside another vehicle to parallel park and got out to put a coin in the meter he was about to pull up to - only to have a traffic agent block his route and issue him a ticket for being double parked, he said.

Mr. Kavesh did not fight the ticket, so there is no documentary proof of his claim, but Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz says a similar problem is the primary bane of Riverdale drivers.

"We get regular complaints about one particular thing, which is extraordinarily annoying and outrageous, which is somebody pulls up in front of, let's say, Blue Bay," said Mr. Dinowitz, referring to the Johnson Avenue diner, "to let somebody out of the car. They're stopped for like ten seconds … and they'll get a ticket for double parking."

Restaurants are hard-hit, managers and neighbors say, because their customers need to park for a long period of time.

"Customers, sometimes they run away because there's no parking," said Jerlin Vargas, a manager at La Parilla Latina, a Broadway steakhouse. "The police, they're outside giving tickets to everybody."

This is part of the August 20, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you. Click here.