Marcel Moran, a PhD candidate at the University of California’s Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning, spent a month last fall visiting every police station in New York City as part of a research project for his graduate program. He walked the perimeter of each station to see whether vehicles — both personal and NYPD-labeled — were parked on sidewalks (partially or fully) and/or in crosswalks.
He found these instances of illegal parking at 70 out of 77 stations across the five boroughs, and every single station in the Bronx and Brooklyn. Moran said he observed vehicles parked on sidewalks at 69 stations and in crosswalks at 36 stations during his November 2022 trips across the city.
In the Bronx, he found that all 12 precincts had cars parked on the sidewalk and all but three — the 41, 52 and 47 precincts — had cars parked in crosswalks, Moran told the Bronx Times.
Some may argue that it’s a sheer coincidence that the vast majority of police stations in the city had this kind of parking debauchery on the day Moran happened to visit. But he also analyzed historical Google street images going back 15 years, and a pattern was clear.
“There did not seem to be an increase or decrease in this behavior between 2007 and now,” Moran told the Bronx Times. “It’s just been incredibly high throughout that period.”
According to Moran, Google took an average of nine images of each station between 2007 and 2022, resulting in 703 archival pictures, of which 82% showed either parking on sidewalks, crosswalks, or both. All Bronx stations had historical evidence of the parking behavior, Moran said.
During his single visits to each of the 77 stations across NYC, 91% had obstructive parking.
Moran, whose research interests are pedestrian, transit and bike issues in cities, published his findings in a peer-reviewed academic article called “Authorized Vehicles Only: Police, parking, and pedestrian access in New York City” in the academic…
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