Sadik-Kahn, Quinn announce a small gift for car owners, with conditions
Christine Quinn and Janette Sadik-Kahn. Dan Rosenblum
2:13 pm Jul. 20, 2011
Sunset Park will be the testing ground for a new law empowering qualifying community boards to cancel a day of street-cleaning from each week. The city is hoping that giving communities the ability to effectively award themselves days off from alternate-side parking will entice residents to keep their own streets clean.
Yesterday afternoon, City Council members and city-agency heads met on a shady residential street next to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway to speak to press about the new plan. Council Speaker Christine Quinn, members Letitia James, Sara González and Brad Lander of Brooklyn, city transportation commissioner Janette Sadik Khan and city sanitation commissioner John Doherty stood on the sidewalk. Members of Community Board 7, which covers Sunset Park and Windsor Terrace, ringed the speakers.
Behind them, traffic crawled northward along the BQE and box trucks slowly climbed up 44th Street. Cars coming up from Third Avenue slowed down to watch the congregation of cameras and suits. A cyclist slowly rode up the street’s incline and was honked at by a red SUV.
Quinn talked about rewarding neighborhoods that keep their streets clean, explaining the community boards in neighborhoods that maintain an average cleanliness rating above 90 percent for two years will be able to request one day off from street cleaning.
“It’s important to note here that no community board is going to have this forced upon them,” said Quinn. “This is also a great day for New Yorkers because it further reaffirms the importance of community board and their role in being voices for our community.”
Quinn also hinted at new parking policies coming down the line.
“This is the first in a series of reforms that will simplify parking in the city and make it easier for drivers to find parking spots,” she said.
Sadik Khan spoke briefly. Under her, the Department of Transportation has focused on policies to make travel easier for cyclists and pedestrians, sometimes at the expense of drivers. (Last week, some participants in yesterday’s event, including Sadik Khan and Lander, were served with subpoenas as part of an ongoing lawsuit involving bike lanes on Prospect Park West.)
“As George Costanza pointed out in Seinfeld, alternative side of the street parking [is] really a uniquely New York ritual,” she said. “And it can be sort of tricky, you know, to keep up to date with the rules of the road on A.S.P.”
She summarized the new measure as one that is explicitly not zero-sum.
“We’re here today to celebrate a win-win for communities,” she said. “Communities that have a demonstrated record on keeping their streets clean will have the luxury of having street cleaning regulations reduced to once a week.”
Though Sunset Park will be the first community to be affected by the new law, the sanitation department previously tested an identical proposition through pilot programs in two Brooklyn community boards and one in the Bronx.
“It’s not any different,” said Doherty. “It’s basically the first community board that’s come to the forefront requesting that they get a reduction because they met the standard that was established by the City Council and Speaker Quinn’s office.”
Lander suggested that City Hall would be keeping close tabs on the success of the venture.
“I want to make clear that at the bill signing ceremony, the mayor was very clear,” he said. “He turned to the commissioner and said, ‘What’s going to happen when one of those streets isn’t clear enough?’ So he’s watching, and so we do have to keep up this perseverance and partnership and make sure not only that we’ve gotten here today and also that we work together.”
With a carrot, there’s always a stick: Rewarded with less street sweeping, residents need to find ways to reduce litter and encourage recycling, otherwise the sanitation department will reinstate the sweeping days.
“This could be a permanent change, but it is not definitely a permanent change,” Quinn told reporters. “If the cleanliness ratings decrease, then people will have the old alternate side of the street parking schedule put back into place.”
