Upper West Side school teachers, scrambling for parking, rack up thousands of dollars in fines
Teachers and staff at an Upper West Side elementary school have racked up thousands of dollars in parking tickets since the fall, the latest clash over hard-to-find parking on NYC’s congested streets.
P.S. 145 The Bloomingdale School has only four designated parking spots near its building on 105th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, creating fierce competition for the coveted spots. Otherwise its structure and playground are surrounded by “no standing” zones during school days and hours, where education parking permits are not valid.
Transportation officials said those zones must be left open “to clear the curb for pick ups and drop offs.”
But school staffers, while they may be breaking the rules, are pushing back against them.
One of their main complaints is that there has been uneven enforcement. School employees who have been double-ticketed by one traffic agent for both illegal parking and misusing permits told The News they used to park in the zone with placards without receiving tickets until this year.
The agent ticketed 18 cars last Tuesday — amounting to $3,240 in fines, according to school sources.
Another source of consternation for school employees: Other cars without placards in the “no standing” zone on the same day during school hours did not appear to be ticketed, according to video footage reviewed by The News.
“We don’t want to be lawbreakers,” said Veronica Chan, a kindergarten teacher who is pregnant and commutes from Hartsdale, in Westchester. “I just would like to continue what I do, which is teaching and I love it.”
Half of Chan’s students are asylum seekers, while enrollment at P.S. 145 has grown by 33 percent this school year with refugees from South American countries and Ukraine.
“I have a lot of parents and have to tend to their needs,” she said. “Especially because they’re new, you have to be available, and this hinders availability.”
School staffers in New York City are not entitled to on-street parking spots near schools, a policy that has been the subject of litigation and major overhauls over the last two decades. Those battles have resulted in an imbalance between parking permits and available spots, laying the groundwork for conflict at schools like P.S. 145.
Under the Bloomberg administration, teacher parking permits were cut from 63,000 to around 11,000 to align the number of placards with the quantity of spots available — to reduce traffic and congestion, and crack down on illegal parking in a public transit-rich city.
The union that represents principals and other school leaders, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, sued the city to reinstate placards for its members. After a court found that Bloomberg had illegally changed employee’s rights to permits without collective bargaining, Mayor Bill de Blasio issued tens of thousands of new parking permits for administrators, teachers and staff.
Despite the proliferation of permits, the Department of Transportation does not add parking spots or move locations “under any circumstances,” according to a spokesperson for the agency. The spaces have been frozen for more than a decade, including when new schools are built.
At the time they were capped, a New York Times investigation found that some schools in less congested neighborhoods had dozens of on-street parking spots, while others in congested areas had few available spaces for teachers.
Teachers at P.S. 145 for various reasons — whether they live outside city limits, face health concerns, or need access to a car to support families — pushed back against the approach.
“It’s not fair for me to tell my coworkers you shouldn’t drive. Everybody has their own reasons why they’re driving,” said Adelina Bicaj, a school aide, who recently had brain surgery.
Hesitant to take public transit while she recovered, Bicaj tallied $500 in parking tickets over the past four months.
“I don’t want to take the risk for a job,” she said.
Evan Simo-Bednarski contributed reporting.
