Someone recently made an app here in Germany where you can take a photo of offending cars and the app automatically forwards the information to the authorities. Perhaps someone can do something like that for NY?
But it only really does anything for Taxi & Licensing Commission-plated vehicles (taxis, rideshares, black car services, that kind of thing). For every other vehicle, it doesn't do shit, and the cops don't care. They largely don't even live in NYC and most of them commute to work in cars. There's a big culture of police not enforcing parking regulations on themselves, so you see rampant placard abuse and personal vehicles parked illegally all over sidewalks and such near police stations. The cops mostly have a windshield view of the city (they almost never patrol outside of a vehicle, and they don't live here), so they see themselves as drivers and the inhabitants of the city themselves, especially cyclists, are othered.
So it's a horrible combination all around and practically what it means is that cops rarely do shit about vehicle infractions but go after cyclists with a vengeance. And the mayor is too chickenshit to do anything about it; he's afraid of upsetting the police union, and the police union is terrible (it almost always sides with cops even when they are guilty of absolutely egregious abuses of power).
Not being from New York, it was hard for me to comprehend how much political power the police union has there. Dating someone from there, and by extension taking a passing interest in the city's politics, it has been eye-opening to see how much influence their protests exert over the mayor's office/political process more broadly.
It's crazy. Most of them don't even live in the city, and yet they have an unbelievably larger amount of political power per capita than any other constituency in the city save for higher-up politicians.
Police unions are the only unions that people on the right like, and they're the only unions that people on the left dislike. It's a weird inversion.
They also joyride at reckless speeds around the borough of Queens blaring sirens and driving the wrong way down one way streets for fun. That's at night, while ON duty.
Inebriated police driving off duty are also a significant problem in the outer boroughs and are rarely prosecuted in any meaningful way for doing so...
If nothing is done about the above, seems like there's little chance that parking in bike lanes or on sidewalks in front of lunch/snack spots is going to be addressed.
Yes, you can document this kind of thing all you like with the 311 app but cops will "investigate" and find no problems and take no action. Another good twitter account documenting this kind of stuff is https://twitter.com/placardabuse
Yep, citizen effort here as well in Oakland. Me and a couple folks created https://www.lanelookout.org to do precisely this. We got a lot of support from our local code for America chapter, OpenOakland.
Source in German: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/app-wegeheld-falschpark... Here's an English article: https://road.cc/content/news/258976-german-app-lets-cyclists...