Seven minutes after street sweeping began on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on Tuesday morning, sanitation workers and the local city councilwoman hit the streets to deliver justice.
“Move your car!” the councilwoman, Gale Brewer, shouted as she slapped a large neon-green, shield-shaped sticker on a Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Nearby, a driver got in his parked car and peeled away to avoid being next.
The stickers, which shame New Yorkers for failing to make way for street sweepers, are back after a 14-year hiatus. Coupled with a $65 ticket, they are designed to serve as a public slap on the wrist.
The stickers were used for 25 years before the City Council banned them in 2012. Ms. Brewer sponsored a bill this year to bring them back.
The new sticker carries the rebuke: “This vehicle violated N.Y.C. street cleaning rules. As a result, this street could not be properly cleaned.”
Then, in smaller print: “Remove this sticker with warm water and a scraper.”
The tree-lined stretch of West 90th Street near Columbus Avenue where the sticker campaign began is known for poor compliance with the city’s alternate-side parking rules, sanitation officials said. Drivers who park on the street are required to move their cars twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday, from 8:30 a.m. to 10 a.m.
Many New Yorkers ignore the rules, accepting the tickets as a cheaper alternative to paying for a garage. Others deeply resent having to stay home and sit in a double-parked car as they wait for the sweeper to go by.
Mary O’Reilly, who lives on the block and diligently moved her car on Tuesday, said she thought the stickers could change behavior.
“It is frustrating when you come out to move your car and others haven’t,” she said. “Then you’re navigating around them, as well as trying to get out of the way of the sanitation truck.”
Ms. O’Reilly said there was “incessant horn honking” on street-sweeping days and that she would welcome a reprieve. Moments later, a driver started leaning on a horn.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani expressed support for the enforcement effort at an unrelated news conference on Tuesday.
“It’s critically important that the Sanitation Department be able to conduct street cleaning,” he said.
The old, much-hated stickers were notorious for leaving behind adhesive on windows. David G. Greenfield, a former councilman who sponsored the bill to get rid of the stickers, said on Tuesday that they had damaged cars.
“A ticket is a penalty,” he wrote on social media. “Gluing trash to someone’s windshield is vandalism.”
The sanitation commissioner, Gregory Anderson, said that the effort was not meant to be punitive.
“The goal is not to put stickers on cars — the goal is to clean the street,” he said.
Mr. Anderson said the city was also starting a pilot program in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn to reduce the number of weekly street-cleaning days from two to one in the hope that drivers actually move that day.
“We’re using the carrot and the stick approach,” he said. “The sticker, unfortunately, is the stick. Reducing frequency is the carrot. We’ll see what works.”
Ms. Brewer, a neighborhood fixture who also took on illegal cannabis stores, said that something had to change.
“People in the neighborhood are livid,” she said. “The streets are filthy. It is really depressing to see the sweeper go down the middle of the street because every single space has a car in it.”
The post The Parking Sticker of Shame Is Back in New York City appeared first on New York Times.
