Prospect Heights pilot finds that cutting one day of enforcement made drivers worse, prompting calls to add an extra day of rules purely to be disobeyed
A landmark study of alternate-side parking in Brooklyn has confirmed what every New Yorker has privately known since birth: give a driver one fewer day of rules and he will break the other days out of pure momentum. A pilot in Prospect Heights found that drivers followed alternate-side parking rules less often when fewer days of enforcement applied, and the city is reportedly delighted to have spent public money proving that people are people.
How Alternate-Side Parking Became a Spiritual Practice
For readers not from the five boroughs, alternate-side parking is a ritual in which millions of citizens move their cars from one side of the street to the other twice a week in order to permit a large vehicle with brushes to pass at roughly four miles per hour and clean nothing. It is New York’s version of a harvest festival, except that nobody is thankful and the only offering is a forty-five dollar ticket.
The pilot in Prospect Heights tested a radical idea: what if the city asked for one less day of this ceremony? The expectation was gratitude. The result was chaos. Compliance dropped across the board, not only on the relaxed day but on the remaining days too, as though the whole neighbourhood had collectively decided that rules were a mood.
The Findings, Presented Without Dignity
Dr. Ludovic Abernathy-Pell, who led the study for the Bureau of Curbside Behavioural Science, summarised the results in a short press conference held, appropriately, in a car. ‘We found that drivers do not experience a rule as a rule,’ he said. ‘They experience it as a negotiation with a man in a vest. Remove one day of the negotiation and they assume the entire contract has been cancelled.’
The study included a control group of residents who were told nothing about the change, and who proceeded to obey the rules at the same low rate as always. ‘It was our most reassuring finding,’ Dr. Abernathy-Pell added. ‘There is still a New York that cannot be moved.’
Five Excuses Documented by Researchers
Investigators logged the reasons given by drivers who were not where they should have been. These include: ‘I thought it was a holiday’, ‘I was only gone five minutes’, ‘The sign is confusing’ and the all-time classic, ‘My cousin said it was fine’. A fifth excuse, delivered by a man in a Mets cap, was simply a long sigh, which researchers coded as a full legal defence.
Why Fewer Rules Produced Worse Drivers
Behavioural scientists have a theory, and the theory is that nobody has read a street sign since 2009. The signs themselves, a patchwork of arrows, clocks, exceptions and tiny red letters, are now understood to be less a communication system than a sort of municipal poetry. A resident of Park Slope reported having spent twenty minutes reading one before concluding it was a haiku about Thursdays.
The finding also sheds light on a neighbourhood tension already running high. Only recently, one fed-up resident put a boot on a parked car after repeated driveway blockages, a gesture that suggests the ordinary citizen has been quietly taking over the enforcement role the city appears to have abandoned.
Lessons From the Other Side of the Atlantic
Britain, as ever, has its own relationship with the car. Observers there note that a London car will hear more about its driver than a therapist ever does, and that the whole subject of vehicles has become one of those topics where a decent man can lose his composure in under four seconds. It is also notable that the country has a whole genre of radio devoted to it, as in the long-running Car Talk London tradition, in which people ring in to confess crimes against the clutch.
A London council once declared a National Nap Day, and the ensuing public response is now remembered as the most peaceful period in the history of municipal parking. Anyone who doubts it can read how the borough dealt with the whole thing, though it is advised that the reading be done lying down.
The Policy Response
Officials in the Department of Transportation are now considering a bold counter-intuitive reform. If fewer days of enforcement produce worse compliance, then perhaps seven days would produce perfect compliance, or at the very least a consistent amount of pain. A proposal would add a Saturday, a Sunday and a ceremonial Day of Reckoning, on which every car in the borough would be required to be on neither side of the street.
Opponents call this madness. ‘You cannot invent a day for the sole purpose of being disobeyed,’ said a Brooklyn civic leader, who then asked whether the day could be a Wednesday. The mayor’s office has not commented, but it is understood that a small team is preparing a response in the form of a laminated sign with a very tiny clock.
What Alternate-Side Parking Teaches Us About Ourselves
The truth, say anthropologists, is that alternate-side parking is not about parking at all. It is about hope. Every driver who moves a car at eight in the morning is performing a small act of faith that tomorrow the street will be clean, the sun will shine, and nobody will have double-parked a Sprinter van outside the bakery. The Prospect Heights study suggests that this faith is both deeply human and deeply misplaced.
For British readers who enjoy the tradition of explaining the capital to its own residents, ask a Londoner remains the finest introduction. The final verdict on alternate-side parking was delivered by a woman in a minivan, who was asked by a reporter whether she had read the new rules. ‘I do not read,’ she said. ‘I park.’ For further comedy at the expense of the commuting classes, see The Daily Mash, and this report arrives via Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
SOURCE: bohiney.com