Hubris Compounds

The problem with never admitting you’re wrong is that hubris compounds. For example, you can’t suspend alternate-side parking if you never admitted there was a storm in the first place. The only obvious course of action to follow is to tell ’em to quit their bitching:

As drivers dug themselves out from Wednesday’s modest but messy snowstorm, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg found himself on the defensive over the city’s decision not to suspend alternate-side parking rules. That move had residents complaining that their cars were ticketed after plows buried them in snow.

The mayor was at times curt, testy and defensive as he answered questions from reporters at a Sanitation Department garage in Woodside, Queens, yesterday, even suggesting that New Yorkers stop “griping” about the situation.

Mr. Bloomberg said the Sanitation Department had done “a spectacular job” of clearing the streets. There were “a lot of fender-benders,” he said, but no major accidents. “We want to get the snow and ice off the roads as quickly as possible so emergency vehicles can get through, so that you can get to work, so that the kids can get to school,” he said. “And if we all do it together rather than griping, we’ll be better off.”

. . .

“I have to dig out the car, and where am I going to put it?” Carol Jolley, 50, asked in frustration. A stay-at-home mother in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, she used a garden shovel to excavate her Volvo sedan from a two-foot snow mound.

“Take a look around,” she said. “I have no place to put it. And then when I come back, this spot will be gone. All my good work for nothing.”