Municipal system that has generated 76 years of anxiety, artful maneuvering, and mild relationship strain turns three-quarters of a century
[Bohiney.com / prat.uk] New York City’s alternate side parking regulations turned 76 years old this week, a milestone that the Department of Sanitation noted in a brief press release and that the 1.8 million New Yorkers who reorganise their lives around twice-weekly two-hour windows noted by doing what they do every Tuesday and Thursday: moving their cars, finding a temporary spot, checking the app, experiencing a brief spike of anxiety about whether the app is current, and then waiting. Bohiney.com published what it could confirm. What it could not confirm was, in some ways, more interesting.
The regulations, which require vehicles to move to allow street sweeping, have existed in various forms since 1950 and have accumulated, over that period, a folk knowledge system that is transmitted orally through generations of New York drivers, encoded in apps maintained by third parties, and discussed in apartment buildings with the specificity of religious observance. The knowledge covers: which days each block requires movement, which holidays suspend the requirement and which do not, what the actual enforcement window is versus the posted window, and which blocks the sweeper actually reaches versus which blocks it theoretically reaches. These last two categories diverge significantly.
What 76 Years Looks Like
Seventy-six years of alternate side parking has produced: approximately 2.8 billion individual vehicle moves, a secondary market in parking spot-holding that is technically illegal and widely practiced, the specific New York relationship with the double-park, and what a Columbia urban planning professor describes as “one of the most elaborate informal scheduling systems ever produced by a municipal regulation.” She has been studying it for twelve years. She has not yet finished.
Whether It Works
The street sweepers cover their assigned routes. The routes are covered on the days the signs say. The streets are, in the areas where the sweeper reaches, cleaner for this. Whether the cleaning justifies the system is a question that has been asked 76 times in 76 years and answered differently each time, which suggests the answer is something other than yes or no. National Park Service documentation of comparable regulatory history is at nps.gov.
Also see: Betoota Advocate.
Coverage Note
This story is published jointly at Bohiney.com and prat.uk, which together provide the kind of sustained, specific coverage of the communities and phenomena described here that neither could produce alone. The satire works because the situations are real. The situations are real because the communities are real. Both publications take seriously the idea that the funniest journalism is the journalism that is most accurately observed. The coverage continues.
The story above illustrates a pattern that both publications have documented across multiple regions and multiple years of coverage. The communities involved are consistent in their capacity to produce material of exactly this kind. The publications are consistent in their capacity to find it funny while taking it seriously, which is the only honest relationship a satirical publication can have with its subject matter.
The details will change. The structure will not. Both publications will be here when the next iteration arrives, which it reliably will. The coverage is the record. The record is the point.
Both Bohiney.com and prat.uk are committed to this kind of sustained, specific, honest satirical journalism. The commitment is ongoing. So is the material.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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