Traffic Agents Thrown Under The Bus (Not Literally!)

Note that they wouldn’t need to sit down with merchants and “retrain” their agents if City Hall wasn’t trying to balance the budget on dubious double-parking tickets:

“New instructions have been given to our traffic agents. The way we issue summonses will be different and we ask our agents to be patient,” said Frank Sepulveda, the NYPD’s director of traffic enforcement for the city. “By the end of this month all our agents should have the new training. We will look at how we can handle difficult summons situations differently.”

. . .

On problems, businessman Dan Texeira led the complaint barrage. “I stopped my car to let off my son. Just then a traffic agent cut off in front of my car and gave me a ticket.

“That wasn’t right,” said Sepulveda.

The Silent Majority Needs To Speak Up

First, set aside the inconvenient facts that owning a dog in a cramped city apartment is inherently cruel and that installing dog runs (i.e., red-light districts for dog defecation) constitutes a ludicrously generous surrender of precious public space. The big problem is that a vocal minority of dog owners are pushing public debate in favor of pets over humans, and we must give huge credit to the state parks department (and not the permissive city parks department, which was infiltrated by dog apologists when the agency’s animal policies were gutted) for putting an end to dog dominance; they are absolutely doing the right thing, and they absolutely deserve our support:

A grassy knoll is the latest territory causing friction between the state Parks Department and Long Island City dog owners after the agency barred canines from the area in Gantry Plaza State Park. Dogs were also banned from the old piers when the rest of the new, six-acre grass area opened up in July.

Rachel Gordon, a state Parks regional director, said the manager of Gantry Plaza saw the grass at the “knoll,” a small strip of grass with a picnic table next to an athletic field, had been turned brown by the effects of dogs relieving themselves there. The ban went into effect last week.

Dog owners can still walk their dogs on the cement areas or in the community garden.

But dog owners in the Queens West towers have not taken the situation lying down. After they said parks [employees] shooed them off the wooden piers in July, they formed DOG LIC to push for more pooch-friendly facilities in the rapidly evolving neighborhood.

. . .

There are three dog runs in the Hunters Point area of Long Island City: one near the now-defunct Tennisport on the site of what will become the Hunters Point South Development; one on Vernon Boulevard between 48th and 49th avenues; and one on 31st Street [actually, 21st Street].

The bottom line is that dog owners will let their animals shit on the grass you sit on, even if there is a dog run directly across the street — because dog owners don’t use the grass except to tear it up around a turd. Additionally, they think nothing of destroying trees, completely ignoring what “curbing your dog” actually means*. Instead of agitating for more permissive policies, they should really be teaching their fellow owners how to be less inconsiderate. As for the rest of us, we shouldn’t give up and we shouldn’t give in — these people’s animals are disgusting and we don’t deserve to have them in our faces . . .

*And even that is a generous allowance — walk through any dog-friendly neighborhood on a hot summer day and the tell-tale scent of dog urine wafts through the streets . . . the smell is horrible, like a pungent chicken broth, and it makes our streets way more pedestrian unfriendly than most other quality-of-life obstacles that the city spends time worrying about.

Location Scout: Gantry Plaza State Park.

Voters, Like Sniveling Little Adolescents, Most Hate Hypocrites

A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips*:

As a billionaire in one of the dining capitals of the world, he can eat anything he wants. But he is obsessed with his weight — so much so that the sight of an unflattering photo of himself can trigger weeks of intense dieting and crankiness, according to friends and aides.

His food issues have become New York City’s. Although he has described his battle against unhealthy foods as common-sense public policy that will shed pounds (and save lives), many of his targets overlap with his own cravings.

“I like a Big Mac like everybody else,” he confessed the other day, explaining the city’s warts-and-all approach to fast food. “I just want to know how many calories are in it.”

Under his watch, the city has declared sodium an enemy, asking restaurants and food manufacturers to voluntarily cut the salt in their dishes by 20 percent or more, and encouraging diners to “shake the habit” by asking waiters for food without added salt.

But Mr. Bloomberg, 67, likes his popcorn so salty that it burns others’ lips. (At Gracie Mansion, the cooks deliver it to him with a salt shaker.) He sprinkles so much salt on his morning bagel “that it’s like a pretzel,” said the manager at Viand, a Greek diner near Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side town house.

Not even pizza is spared a coat of sodium. When the mayor sat down to eat a slice at Denino’s Pizzeria Tavern on Staten Island recently, this reporter spotted him applying six dashes of salt to it.

And then there’s the concept of Asshole-In-Chief:

When he does not like the food, he rarely holds back. After dining at Blue Smoke, Mr. Meyer’s barbecue restaurant on East 27th Street, the mayor told Mr. Meyer, “I just don’t like it.”

Mr. Meyer tried inviting him back, but the mayor would not budge. “It never feels good when somebody tells you they don’t like your restaurant, but it’s nice when a politician does not pander,” he said, adding that the mayor has heaped praise on Union Square Cafe.

*In fact, Thompson should consider making this a slogan of sorts, e.g., you think it’s OK to suspend term limits just this once, but consider the deleterious long-term effects . . .

The Horrible Truth About Quotas

Buried in the story about the Parks Department ticketing “elderly” ladies for swimming after hours is this tidbit:

Mayor Bloomberg, at a recent sit-down with reporters and editors at this newspaper, denied that the tickets were part of a way to balance the city’s books, but did say some form of quota system is needed to make sure enforcement agents are doing their jobs.

Cheaper, Easier Collars

Another possibility is that they’re just being more “efficient” by hanging out and waiting for every tiny infraction:

Merchants and drivers in Riverdale and Kingsbridge say an ongoing city ticket blitz is bad for business — but the NYPD denies that there’s a ticket blitz at all.

By the NYPD’s count, the numbers of parking tickets given out this year are down by a sizeable margin across the city and a considerable one in the Bronx, with 874,541 tickets issued so far, compared with 905,428 during the same period in 2008 — 122,055 of those in the Bronx compared with 136,926 during the same period last year.

How is it possible to reconcile what many people say they see on the streets with the police’s accounting? How do the numbers from the last two years match up with those over a longer period of time? A representative of the NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner, Public Information says the police no longer have data from 2007, so they say there’s no way of knowing.