97% of NYC fire hydrant tickets are issued within 7 feet (despite law requiring parking 15 feet away)
Posted by Locksmith_Usual
97% of NYC fire hydrant tickets are issued within 7 feet (despite law requiring parking 15 feet away)
Posted by Locksmith_Usual
8 Comments
Looks like 100% are issued within 10 feet, interesting.
i got 2 tickets in one week. one ticket said i was within 5ft the other said 7ft. i measured 10ft which is still less than the 15ft legal limit so i ate both but was sour.
https://preview.redd.it/btxc04sdkkfe1.png?width=2204&format=png&auto=webp&s=c4f4dc9a91e62719fa4d6f93c7d68c235131d49b
65% of issued tickets were for cars literally blocking the hydrant; furthest ticket written out of 1000 was 11ft.
The intent of the law is to enable access to the hydrant by a firetruck. The ticketing pattern supports that. 15′ would likely take away 2-3 parking spots vs 1-2.
As a New Yorker, I’ve never once seen a parking cop measure the distance from a car to a fire hydrant.
Interesting, but worth noting that the “0” bin accounts for far more actual space than any other. A car could park anywhere within 1 car length of the hydrant (~15 feet) and still be considered 0 feet away and blocking it. All the other bins represent exactly 2 feet of actual space (1 in front and 1 behind).
If you parked randomly on the street with completely uniform enforcement within the 15 foot limit, you’d *still* be much more likely to get a ticket for parking 0 feet away, than for parking 1 foot away, just by the simple fact that “blocking the hydrant” is a much bigger space than “between 1-2 feet from the hydrant”.
The “tickets per foot of curb” statistic would be quite a bit closer (ballpark 1/7th of what’s shown here for “0”) but I expect would still show selective enforcement.
Family member’s a firefighter; 15 feet would be great, but not really necessary. Like everybody’s seen, they’ll just route around/through cars.
The biggest issue around here is they won’t write tickets at all, even for completely blocked hydrants, in a neighbourhood full of old wooden houses. The usual “determined police action was not necessary,” or “we didn’t see anything.” NYPD = lazyasses.
***TL;DR Article Summary***
* 97% of tickets were written within 7 feet, even though the the law requires 15ft; if you park 7ft+, you’re very unlikely to get a ticket
* 62% of tickets were written for cars that were directly blocking the hydrant
* The furthest ticket written was 11 feet – not a single ticket further than 11 feet!
* Parking tickets in NYC must show how far away the car was parked from the hydrant—or at least, valid tickets do.
The most common distance from the hydrant was zero feet—as in, the car was fully blocking the hydrant. Needless to say, this is not a good place to park if you’re hoping to avoid a ticket, plus it’s an undeniable fire hazard. 62% of tickets were written for cars fully blocking a hydrant, and the remaining 38% of tickets were for cars parked a lot closer to hydrants than the mandatory 15 feet.
It turns out that fewer than one in ten tickets (9.2%) went to cars that were more than five feet from a hydrant. Fewer than one in thirty (3.0%) was for parking beyond seven feet, and only one out of every hundred (0.7%) went to cars more than eight feet out.
Among the 72 handwritten tickets in our dataset, eight omitted the distance from the hydrant, two were illegible, two said “in front of,” and one eyebrow-raising ticket said “on it.” At least 10 of these 72 would have been dismissed had they been challenged (only one was challenged it was dismissed.
[https://paynycfines.com/articles/avoiding-parking-tickets/how-far-away-from-a-nyc-hydrant-do-you-really-need-to-park-](https://paynycfines.com/articles/avoiding-parking-tickets/how-far-away-from-a-nyc-hydrant-do-you-really-need-to-park-)