Get it in gear.
The city botched the first two days of a brand new alternate side parking project this week — resulting in dozens of Brooklynites erroneously receiving neon green “shame” stickers and $65 fines plastered on their windshields.
The drivers were hit with the annoying penalties after the city said it was no longer enforcing alternate side twice a week in Prospect Heights starting Monday — but parking enforcers failed to get the message and wrongly ticketed numerous cars that were legally parked under the new rules.
The mix-up on what was supposed to be an effort to ease onerous parking rules left residents infuriated.
“That’s not a valid excuse! Come on, this is the age of tech, so there’s no excuse at all for that. You all, come on. You got emails, you got texts, you got all those things you can do. So I don’t understand,” raged Glenn Sainsbury, whose nephew, Christopher, was one of the many punished.
Christopher woke up Monday to find an ugly green adhesive stuck to his car window, which he was more upset about than the $65 ticket.
“It’s not easy stuff to get off. You’ve got to take up a spatula or something, or a razor to get it off. I guess they get tired of people not moving their cars,” said Sainsbury.
This week marked the first that the wealthy neighborhood was meant to enjoy a reduced ASP schedule that sliced the number of times drivers needed to move their cars for street sweepers in half.
Prospect Heights is typically saddled with twice-weekly sweepings per side of the road — which results in the neighborhood being littered with more double parking than trash.
Monday was intended to be the first day, but the traffic agents who doled out tickets had never heard of the pilot initiative, sources said.
Each ticket, issued for failing to move a car during scheduled street sweeping, costs $65.
The Sanitation Department told The Post it notified several agencies like the NYPD and Finance Department about the program in the weeks ahead of its start date.
But a source close to the issue said just one notice was sent on the issue without confirmation or follow-up, leading to the orange-ticket blunder.
There was a lack of “coordination” between the DSNY and NYPD, the insider said.
The NYPD emphasized that the slip-up had already been resolved.
“These summonses were issued in error and have already been voided. We will ensure that the Department of Sanitation creates a formal process for notifying the NYPD about any requests for changes to longstanding parking rules,” a spokesperson said.
Police could not share how many summonses were issued, but City Councilmember Crystal Hudson’s office received about 12 complaints.
“Drivers have notified our office that they received summonses on days when enforcement was not supposed to occur in the pilot area,” Hudson told The Post.
“Our office has reached out directly to the Department of Sanitation, local NYPD precincts, and the NYPD Chief of Traffic to ensure traffic enforcement agents do not issue tickets on non-enforcement days. The City has assured us that any summonses issued on non-designated enforcement days will be dismissed.”
The blunder will be corrected for next week, her office said.
The pilot program — aimed at determining whether once-per-week sweeping is enough to keep the neighborhood clean — will continue through Sept. 25.
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