You mean poor bastards like FedEx and UPS?
Yeah, I guess I mean even FedEx and UPS. Would NYC be NYC without their services? What would a City, the size of NYC, do without FedEx and UPS? Have you EVER seen a USPS truck get a ticket? They double park in exactly the same manner as does the private delivery options, but they don't get tickets.
Just think about this for a second: If FedEx and UPS didn't get ticketed in NYC, they could probably reduce OUR costs to use THEIR services by the 20% of their profit margins that are now dedicated to paying those fines. That would roll back their prices to us to around the mid-1980s when the now $12.95 overnight letter costs only $10.50.
The focus of the ticket blitz is not on how people do or do not make a living. It's penalizing people who simply do the wrong thing. People who cause the potential for a hazardous condition.
Now you are making my point for me. The ticket blitzes of this City are indiscriminate in who gets ultimately penalized. Truck delivery people should not be the target of these freaking blitzes. Privately owned passenger cars are the real problem. And I will never understand the concept of fining people for the potential of their actions rather than for their actual dangerous actions.
There are a myriad of reasons why small mom and pop stores go out of business. The advent of Costco, Home Depot, Target, Bed Bath and Beyond have affected such closures more so than parking.
In the example I gave, this small business had already survived the large box stores and found that their personal service was more important to their customer base.
I agree, there needs to be some sort of regulation which allows businesses to have deliveries in a way which is not intrusive to the community at large.
Or what? Go the way of Main Street in Flushing or Steinway Street in Astoria? If a retail business has no merchandise to sell they cease being a retail business and become yet another empty retail location.
Driving is a privilege.
Really? For whom? The able bodied? Those who live in major metropolitan areas filled with shops of all descriptions that can satisfy all of the needs of it's people? If I were to consider it a privilege, it would be one dedicated for the rich, sorta like polo, or it wouldn't be so expensive to participate in the sport. Right now, driving, implying ownership of a car, is so cost prohibitive that it is purely for the wealthier residents of our communities or for those whose cars are their only alternative ways of getting around.
Let me share a little incident with y'all.
One day, last week, while parking my car in front of my house after a doctor's appointment, I was approached by an on foot uniformed representative of the DOT ticket patrol! (Even I am pleased with myself that I didn't say the asshole who walks my block while talking on his cellphone, drinking his Starbucks (iced) coffee with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, while scanning registration stickers and printing out tickets at the exact minute that start the Street Cleaning Alternate Parking rules!) And mind you, I am in a 4-day-a-week zone, even though we rarely get to see a street cleaner more than once every 2 weeks, if that. Anyway, he growls at me and tells me to move my car. I remove my official NYC Handicapped Parking Permit from my dashboard and I show it to him. He tsks and walks on. Right across from where I live is an NYFD ambulance depot and all those EMTs park on the sidewalk all day and night. Not a single one of their cars has ever been ticketed. Yet as the 3rd shift bus driver and the 3rd shift ER nurse are running out of my building to discover that have been ticketed at 11:30:15 AM and 11:30:56 AM, respectively. Sure, they deserved the tickets; they were (albeit by mere seconds) parked illegally, but exactly what do the residents of my block have to do to stop this sidewalk parking that is being ignored, and thereby condoned for years.
Free the trucks to make their deliveries, and get the damned cars off the sidewalks!