New York City’s mean streets are back.
The city Finance Department is making up for time lost during the COVID-19 pandemic by beefing up efforts to boot and tow vehicles that have racked up unpaid parking and traffic tickets.
Through the first four months of the year, city marshals and deputy sheriffs set their sights on drivers who failed to pay off camera tickets for speeding and running red lights.
But since May, it’s been an all-out feeding frenzy to fill the cash-strapped city’s coffers as the marshals and deputy sheriffs once again began cracking down on drivers with unpaid parking tickets.
Glen Bolofsky, president of parkingticket.com, a popular Web site that helps motorists beat fines, said the city is wrongly going after average New Yorkers — many of whom can’t afford to pay their tickets — while it offers significant discounts to big delivery companies like UPS and Amazon.
“Towing and booting vehicles that are not causing a safety hazard, or disrupting our quality of life, is unfair,” he said.
From Jan. 1 to April 29 this year, 19,965 vehicles have been booted, skyrocketing 471% from the 3,495 boots during the same period in 2021, a Post review of city Department of Finance data shows.
Towing, a tactic used as a last resort to combat scofflaws, also inched closer to pre-pandemic levels, as 6,097 vehicles were impounded through April 29, compared to just 933 a year earlier — a staggering 553% increase.
During the same period in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were 36,623 boots and 7,681 tows.
The city stopped booting and towing operations in mid-March 2020, after then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a pandemic state of emergency. Booting and towing resumed in February 2021 on all vehicles that owe more than $350 in camera summonses.
Those hoping to get their vehicles back must pay off the tickets, plus shell out at least another $220 in fees, including storage costs.
In March, the city sent out mailers warning drivers it would begin collecting on all unpaid tickets issued since the start of the pandemic — a move Finance says has already generated more than $80 million in revenue.
Although the parking-ticket threshold to boot or tow vehicles is also usually $350, the Department of Finance says for now, it’s only targeting parking scofflaws with more than $500.
With so many cars eligible for enforcement, many New Yorkers are now waking up each morning to parades of parked vehicles on their block clamped with boots.
Mike Dolan, 53, of the Upper East Side, said he was shocked last week after spotting seven cars — including his own — booted on his block at East 94th Street near 2nd Avenue, while four others were also booted a block away.
Dolan — who admitted racking up more $600 in unpaid parking tickets — said, “I think people did have a false sense of security that, ‘Oh yeah nothing’s gonna happen,’ then one day reality struck.”
“It definitely makes you feel like you are taken advantage of” by the city, “and like they hold you hostage,” quipped Rebecca Vinson-Conover, 35, a Queens-based restaurateur whose fiancé’s car was booted last month along with six others parked on the same Jackson Heights street.
However, many other New Yorkers say the city should be doing more to crack down on traffic ticket scofflaws — especially with traffic deaths surging.
“They could be doing a thousand times more, and it still wouldn’t be enough,” said John Kelly, 37, a Manhattan-based operations manager.
Francesca Samperisi, 26, of Brooklyn, said she relies on her car for work but is considering getting rid of it after recently waking up and finding five of her neighbors’ vehicles booted.
“I have been on the fence on getting rid of my car prior to this — this adds another to the con of owning a car in the city list,” she said.