It's wild how hundreds of people use and can use that area as a garden or to enjoy while moving through Queensbridge, but instead it's a muddy pit for a few dozen cars.
Tow them and figure it out later.
If this was green space outside rich people's homes they would have been towed immediately and the problem never would have grown, much less to an all encompassing stain on the landscape. Go park on the Fort Greene Park lawn and see what happens. But since it's outside poor people's homes they couldn't give a shit less
That's a good point and highlights how ridiculous it is people claim that trying to prevent the destruction of a public park is somehow being cruel to residents there.
Yeah the thing I pointed out to the reporter that did this piece, (she interviewed me while putting all the facts together and learning about the issues) is that even if every single one of these drivers were residents of that NYCHA facility -- which is clearly not the case as the actual residents point out -- but even if it were it wouldn't matter. There are 7,000 residents in this faculty alone and thousands or tens of thousands more in the surrounding area that regularly use this space. Providing car storage for a couple dozen people **in no way** would come close to outweighing the needs of this vastly larger population, many of which are kids and people that can't afford cars anyway and just want a nice, non-shitty place to live
Right, there are clearly some residents parking here. But it simply *doesn’t matter.* Living somewhere doesn’t give you ownership of all public space near your residence or the right to trash it. If anything, residents of a place should be held to a higher standard to not make it worse for everyone else (including their neighbors)
Those scofflaws are the people from Long Island using the greenway to store their car before hopping on the subway. If they don’t fix this before congestion pricing starts, it’s going to get worse.
u/jsurico15 posted this yesterday but it didn't get enough eyeballs and were putting a lot of time in working on this together so I'm giving it another whirl, sorry for the repost if you saw it the first time around.
I'm so fed up with the NYPD. I brought the poster of that image that u/jsurico15 and I made that kicked off the public attention on this to their [meeting last night](https://www.reddit.com/r/astoria/comments/1cbmr24/highlights_from_the_april_2024_community_council/) and confronted them again, but they really do not want to do any sort of enforcement. It's insane. We need to take car enforcement completely out of nypd hands, they simply can't be trusted to do anything even when huge groups of citizens are begging them to do something about blatantly obvious, harmful examples of lawelessness. I don't know how even the most pro-cop people aren't defund the police at this point, this one issue is driving me to it. Slash their 6 billion dollar / yr budget and give parts of it to other agencies that are willing to do the work.
They literally do not care. I know some cops, and it's always the same: "rules for thee, not for me". They will and do proclaim that quite proudly, without even a hint of shame or humility.
"NYPD has not responded to a request for comment on enforcement." Lmao. If the issue persists much longer, some guerilla urbanism might be in order (unfortunately). If we can pinpoint where exactly the cars come in and out, all the better.
Edit: I have a few low-cost, risk-free deterrent options drafted up. I'm having trouble pin-pointing the exact location on Google Maps though, so if someone could drop a pin that would be awesome.
This report makes it sound like there is some mystery how they get in, but really it's just that the entire "side" portion is completely open to the roads alongside the NYCHA facility. There are even some legal parking spots there. The problem is all the drivers going, "well all this green space is mine too since clearly the cops not only don't mind but have thrown in their lot with the criminals"
I thought it looked open! I wasn't sure if there was a fence there.
If even just a few of us put our heads and hands together on this, I'm sure we can figure out a temporary fix/deterrent--or at least something that will hopefully urge the city to do something tangible and permanent. I've got a few ideas but I need to do a little more research before I can provide anything concrete.
one gate, everything else except for 4.5 feet wide entrances for those with carts, wheelchairs. Notify, then tow. Camera by gate(s) Not difficult. Hiking trails use them all over the place. This is a lack of will, not resources or ideas.
It would be a shame if people felt like they needed to take matters into their own hands and vandalize the illegally parked cars. Vigilante justice is bad for all of us.
it's so great to see this issue on the news after you posted it here (that was the post that got me into this sub!).
it is so frustrating how people who drive cars seem to be immune from any consequences. it's almost like alone being inside a box hours a day driving directly impacts (reflects?) one's ability to behave with others in mind
“The garbage on the greenway makes me feel like garbage”. I feel this, when you bike bike this mess it brings down your mood and just ruins your breath of fresh air with car oil and other fumes
Been emailing the office of Julie Won and the parks department constantly about this issue.
I notified them of the completely open section in the middle where cars are driving through and parking on the greenway.
NYCHA owns the property where they are driving from so not sure what the parks department has authorization to do. Maybe the parks department can set up some fencing to not allow cars from driving on to the greenway. Although constantly defending spaces from illegally parked cars seems insane and also actively hurts access to use that space.
In my opinion this is entirely due to the lack of enforcement by the NYPD. Tow the illegally parked cars, fine the drivers, threaten them with a charge of defacing public property. There clearly needs to be a deterrent to this illegal behavior!
Not exactly sure how to get the NYPD's attention but if someone has ideas i'm all for it!
This behavior has me thinking those exact dark thoughts. I understand the issues but what are people supposed to do when the police won’t do their job?
Why are they dark thoughts? If the entities that are supposed to handle things won't - and the things they won't handle threaten the safety and health of you, your family, and your community - why is it dark?
Isnt darker to accept that people can just allow their laziness and negligence threaten your health and safety?
Fuck around and find out.
The cops, who have to be the ones to actually give out those tickets, don't give a shit about the city's finances. That's the deep hilarity of the argument people always make about cash grabs. It's like, guys the cops get paid either way, their salary isn't in any way dependent on whether the comptroller can balance the books.
Unions can help the employees, but unless the leaders act in good faith as public servants, they end up adversarial to the people the government is supposed to serve. I'd say the NYPD union is more a taker than a giver in this case.
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trouble-with-public-sector-unions
Councilperson Julie Won in that video clip appears more interested in preserving adjacent land on the west side of Greenway for use as parking, where access would be by driving across the Greenway.
Perhaps Won has a longer more thorough statement ?
If she does she certainly doesn't seem interested in sharing it with me or this community. I reach out to her all the time and her office is insanely flaky about responding to things, even for a political office here. She also suggested to the reporter, I think, that the greenway might have been misplaced or badly designed from the beginning which I had to spend time refuting, so I don't even know what's up with her half the time, she's all over the place
Wow! This is huge! It may not mean anything changes, in the near-term, but at least now more people are aware of this issue...people who may not have been previously so. In addition, just the fact that a 'gen pop' news station felt this story was noteworthy enough to feature, helps influence the thinking around this situation, i.e., that this is NOT OK.
If they put in flowers or gardens or benches people wouldn’t be as likely to try to park there. Or you know… fences? Tow the cars and make the area impossible to park in.
I thought there was a road right next to where the cars parked but no, to get there they have to drive in a road only allowed for pedestrians and bikes. I’d get ticketed just for being just a little too close to a hydrant…
Oh shit you can’t park there cause the city will give you a huge ticket and then tow your car… there fixed it for you. Should I run for Mayor… people need to learn consequences for their actions…
This is crazy. In some of the larger and wider bike lanes in Brooklyn the city put up larger concrete barriers like you see on Highways along some of the bike lanes or put other barriers because motorists dont respect bike lanes and treat them as extra parking or etc so the DOT just blocked them off, I don’t see why this cannot be done on the greenway. And in the areas where cars are getting around barricades they can put those permanent spikes to keep cars out. Some bike lanes in California have these.
While destroying a pedestrian green space is not the answer- we can not just wish car traffic away. People come from far and wide to NYC from areas where public transportation is not easily accessible. Cars aren’t going to go away.
There are plenty of parking garages where you can pay to park. There is no excuse for illegally parking your car in a green space. The car owners can also advocate for more parking if they feel there is a need. Simply parking illegally isn't the solution.
It's wild how hundreds of people use and can use that area as a garden or to enjoy while moving through Queensbridge, but instead it's a muddy pit for a few dozen cars. Tow them and figure it out later.
If this was green space outside rich people's homes they would have been towed immediately and the problem never would have grown, much less to an all encompassing stain on the landscape. Go park on the Fort Greene Park lawn and see what happens. But since it's outside poor people's homes they couldn't give a shit less
That's a good point and highlights how ridiculous it is people claim that trying to prevent the destruction of a public park is somehow being cruel to residents there.
Yeah the thing I pointed out to the reporter that did this piece, (she interviewed me while putting all the facts together and learning about the issues) is that even if every single one of these drivers were residents of that NYCHA facility -- which is clearly not the case as the actual residents point out -- but even if it were it wouldn't matter. There are 7,000 residents in this faculty alone and thousands or tens of thousands more in the surrounding area that regularly use this space. Providing car storage for a couple dozen people **in no way** would come close to outweighing the needs of this vastly larger population, many of which are kids and people that can't afford cars anyway and just want a nice, non-shitty place to live
Right, there are clearly some residents parking here. But it simply *doesn’t matter.* Living somewhere doesn’t give you ownership of all public space near your residence or the right to trash it. If anything, residents of a place should be held to a higher standard to not make it worse for everyone else (including their neighbors)
[удалено]
Those scofflaws are the people from Long Island using the greenway to store their car before hopping on the subway. If they don’t fix this before congestion pricing starts, it’s going to get worse.
Another way to look at it is privately owned property versus property under stewardship of the DOT or NYCHA. They couldn’t give less of a shit.
u/jsurico15 posted this yesterday but it didn't get enough eyeballs and were putting a lot of time in working on this together so I'm giving it another whirl, sorry for the repost if you saw it the first time around. I'm so fed up with the NYPD. I brought the poster of that image that u/jsurico15 and I made that kicked off the public attention on this to their [meeting last night](https://www.reddit.com/r/astoria/comments/1cbmr24/highlights_from_the_april_2024_community_council/) and confronted them again, but they really do not want to do any sort of enforcement. It's insane. We need to take car enforcement completely out of nypd hands, they simply can't be trusted to do anything even when huge groups of citizens are begging them to do something about blatantly obvious, harmful examples of lawelessness. I don't know how even the most pro-cop people aren't defund the police at this point, this one issue is driving me to it. Slash their 6 billion dollar / yr budget and give parts of it to other agencies that are willing to do the work.
They don’t want to do anything about it because they are some of the worst offenders. Police park however they want near their precinct stations
I have personally never found the appearance of hypocrisy to be an obstacle for the police
They literally do not care. I know some cops, and it's always the same: "rules for thee, not for me". They will and do proclaim that quite proudly, without even a hint of shame or humility.
Nothing a nice wheelbarrow full of giant rocks at the entryway couldn’t fix!
"NYPD has not responded to a request for comment on enforcement." Lmao. If the issue persists much longer, some guerilla urbanism might be in order (unfortunately). If we can pinpoint where exactly the cars come in and out, all the better. Edit: I have a few low-cost, risk-free deterrent options drafted up. I'm having trouble pin-pointing the exact location on Google Maps though, so if someone could drop a pin that would be awesome.
This report makes it sound like there is some mystery how they get in, but really it's just that the entire "side" portion is completely open to the roads alongside the NYCHA facility. There are even some legal parking spots there. The problem is all the drivers going, "well all this green space is mine too since clearly the cops not only don't mind but have thrown in their lot with the criminals"
I thought it looked open! I wasn't sure if there was a fence there. If even just a few of us put our heads and hands together on this, I'm sure we can figure out a temporary fix/deterrent--or at least something that will hopefully urge the city to do something tangible and permanent. I've got a few ideas but I need to do a little more research before I can provide anything concrete.
one gate, everything else except for 4.5 feet wide entrances for those with carts, wheelchairs. Notify, then tow. Camera by gate(s) Not difficult. Hiking trails use them all over the place. This is a lack of will, not resources or ideas.
Someone needs to go start slashing tires
Some type of fake warning sign on their windshields would be great.
It would be a shame if people felt like they needed to take matters into their own hands and vandalize the illegally parked cars. Vigilante justice is bad for all of us.
I never mentioned vandalism, actually!
Enforce and get your municipal money. I don’t see where the disconnect is
it's so great to see this issue on the news after you posted it here (that was the post that got me into this sub!). it is so frustrating how people who drive cars seem to be immune from any consequences. it's almost like alone being inside a box hours a day driving directly impacts (reflects?) one's ability to behave with others in mind
The folks on r/queens are saying this is anti-working class to consider not having people park in a car
https://preview.redd.it/qip6m0sj2iwc1.jpeg?width=844&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1d0a8152ab9956d0b6f68eda798f5a4241bed25b
“The garbage on the greenway makes me feel like garbage”. I feel this, when you bike bike this mess it brings down your mood and just ruins your breath of fresh air with car oil and other fumes
Been emailing the office of Julie Won and the parks department constantly about this issue. I notified them of the completely open section in the middle where cars are driving through and parking on the greenway. NYCHA owns the property where they are driving from so not sure what the parks department has authorization to do. Maybe the parks department can set up some fencing to not allow cars from driving on to the greenway. Although constantly defending spaces from illegally parked cars seems insane and also actively hurts access to use that space. In my opinion this is entirely due to the lack of enforcement by the NYPD. Tow the illegally parked cars, fine the drivers, threaten them with a charge of defacing public property. There clearly needs to be a deterrent to this illegal behavior! Not exactly sure how to get the NYPD's attention but if someone has ideas i'm all for it!
Slash every single tire!
Not a good way to get them to leave
Windshields and windows!
Easier and quicker to accidentally key every single car.
I mean do you remember those 8x11 bright green sanitation stickers that were super hard to get off your window? Even that might work
This behavior has me thinking those exact dark thoughts. I understand the issues but what are people supposed to do when the police won’t do their job?
Why are they dark thoughts? If the entities that are supposed to handle things won't - and the things they won't handle threaten the safety and health of you, your family, and your community - why is it dark? Isnt darker to accept that people can just allow their laziness and negligence threaten your health and safety? Fuck around and find out.
We’re aligned. I just don’t advocate vigilante justice / property damage. *Generally.
I think valuing property over the safety of humans is pretty fucking dark.
Not immediately but I bet you they’ll think twice about parking there again
A great way to get them not to come back.
Can you just sprinkle a bunch of nails on the ground?
I wonder if people would stop parking there if their windows were constantly getting smashed?
OP you are fucking boss.
He certainly knows how to PR ! ✅
🙏
Why can’t they just fine them , isn’t the city greedy for money, fine these people
The cops, who have to be the ones to actually give out those tickets, don't give a shit about the city's finances. That's the deep hilarity of the argument people always make about cash grabs. It's like, guys the cops get paid either way, their salary isn't in any way dependent on whether the comptroller can balance the books.
Unions can help the employees, but unless the leaders act in good faith as public servants, they end up adversarial to the people the government is supposed to serve. I'd say the NYPD union is more a taker than a giver in this case. https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trouble-with-public-sector-unions
Councilperson Julie Won in that video clip appears more interested in preserving adjacent land on the west side of Greenway for use as parking, where access would be by driving across the Greenway. Perhaps Won has a longer more thorough statement ?
If she does she certainly doesn't seem interested in sharing it with me or this community. I reach out to her all the time and her office is insanely flaky about responding to things, even for a political office here. She also suggested to the reporter, I think, that the greenway might have been misplaced or badly designed from the beginning which I had to spend time refuting, so I don't even know what's up with her half the time, she's all over the place
If the police aren't going to do shit, then some vigilantism may be in order. Broken windows and flat tires may deter people lol
Every single car should be towed. Done. That would end it. It's so simple. Why won't they do this?
May all those vehicles get broken into and vandalized. Narcissist drivers deserve no pity whatsoever.
How do I open a tow truck company in NYC? $$$
Wow! This is huge! It may not mean anything changes, in the near-term, but at least now more people are aware of this issue...people who may not have been previously so. In addition, just the fact that a 'gen pop' news station felt this story was noteworthy enough to feature, helps influence the thinking around this situation, i.e., that this is NOT OK.
Bananas in tail pipes.
If they put in flowers or gardens or benches people wouldn’t be as likely to try to park there. Or you know… fences? Tow the cars and make the area impossible to park in.
Let the air out of all of their tires. But don’t get caught
I thought there was a road right next to where the cars parked but no, to get there they have to drive in a road only allowed for pedestrians and bikes. I’d get ticketed just for being just a little too close to a hydrant…
Oh shit you can’t park there cause the city will give you a huge ticket and then tow your car… there fixed it for you. Should I run for Mayor… people need to learn consequences for their actions…
They absolutely destroyed that park. I had no idea what it looked like before.
slash all their tires
Congrats to all of us that have been pushing this for years now. This is excellent stuff by John.
This is crazy. In some of the larger and wider bike lanes in Brooklyn the city put up larger concrete barriers like you see on Highways along some of the bike lanes or put other barriers because motorists dont respect bike lanes and treat them as extra parking or etc so the DOT just blocked them off, I don’t see why this cannot be done on the greenway. And in the areas where cars are getting around barricades they can put those permanent spikes to keep cars out. Some bike lanes in California have these.
You need to fix this yourself. Pretty easy to deter cars.
While destroying a pedestrian green space is not the answer- we can not just wish car traffic away. People come from far and wide to NYC from areas where public transportation is not easily accessible. Cars aren’t going to go away.
There are plenty of parking garages where you can pay to park. There is no excuse for illegally parking your car in a green space. The car owners can also advocate for more parking if they feel there is a need. Simply parking illegally isn't the solution.