The Upper West Side's Community Board 7 vote, 21-12, to bring back paid parking on Sundays. CB member Marc Glazer proposed the resolution, complaining that free Sunday parking gives drivers license to linger all day and screws businesses whose customers can't park nearby. The City Council had ended pay-to-pray in 2005, but Glazer points out that 1,000 parking spaces have been lost since 2007. The next step: The City Council must approve it. more ›

In the latest City Room "Complaint Box" column (the previous one was about pregnant ladies and subway seats), Ray Rivera takes on the bad parking jobs in his northern Manhattan neighborhood. There's the cop and Buildings Department employee who "live in the neighborhood and park illegally every day in front of fire hydrants or in No Standing zones...They place city placards on their dashboards claiming to be on official duty. As official abuses of power go, this is fairly harmless, I know. But I consider it a gateway to bigger crimes, the way some people say marijuana leads to heavier drugs. Today it’s illegal parking; tomorrow, payoffs from the mob." (Still, Rivera and his neighbors have decided to stay silent, vs. having those city employees look for legal parking with the rest of them.) As for the civilian discourteous parkers, like the sporty Silver Mazda that insists on taking up two spaces even after notes left by neighbors, Rivera fantastzes about plastering "his car with those annoyingly sticky green notices the Sanitation Department uses when you forget to move on alternate-side parking days. You know — the kind you can never fully remove, even with hot water and a scraper." more ›

Mayor Bloomberg's announcement that he would reduce the number of parking permits for civil servants by 20% has annoyed yet another group. Joining police officers, fire fighters, and other emergency workers are teachers. more ›