City Council Bans Sanitation Stickers on Illegally Parked Cars

The City Council approved a parking legislation package Tuesday that aims to make parking enforcement fairer and to eliminate excessive ticketing. The three parts are:

* Being able to cancel a ticket on the spot if you have a muni-meter receipt that’s time-stamped five minutes within the ticket’s time.

* Freezing late fees on tickets until 30 days after they’ve been issued, to give you a chance to contest them.

* Banning the city from placing parking stickers on cars that are said to be violating alternate side parking rules.

It’s those stickers that got under the nails of Brooklyn Councilman David G. Greenfield, who wrote the legislation. The Sanitation Department has used neon stickers in cases of alternate-side parking violations since 1988, issuing about 400 each day alternative-side parking rules are in effect for street cleaning. The City Council argues that the stickers are attached even before motorists are given the chance to prove their innocence.

“Punishing drivers with these impossible-to-remove stickers is unfair and unnecessary,” said Greenfield in a statement. “New York City doesn’t employ methods of public humiliation and shame for those who violate serious crimes, yet has no problem defacing private property with neon stickers because you forgot to move your car on an alternate-side parking day.”

The bill, which keeps in place existing $45 to $60 fines for alternate-side parking violations but ends the practice of placing these stickers on the car’s rear window, received support from Council members, drivers, and the Automobile Association of America when introduced earlier this year.

The Bloomberg administration has voiced its opposition to the entire legislation package, but because it received such overwhelming support in City Council, it seems unlikely the mayor will be able to veto it if that’s his plan.

If you’ve ever dealt with one of these stickers, you know how hard they can be to remove. The Daily News experimented with various removal liquids recently, with Windex leading the pack. What have you found works best?