NYC to restore alternate side parking July 5 amid clean streets push

The five boroughs will fully restore alternate side parking this summer as part of an $11 million effort to improve street cleanliness, the city’s newly appointed sanitation commissioner announced Monday.

The city, which partially suspended alternate parking in March 2020, will reinstate its previous rules on July 5, Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a news conference.

The policy, which allowed drivers to move their vehicles once a week instead of twice, was a “pandemic measure to let people stay inside” that “went on for far too long,” Tisch said.

It also “largely sidelined the best clean streets tool in our arsenal: the mechanical broom,” she added, referring to a type of sanitation truck known as a “street sweeper.”

“The dirty little secret here is that when ASP went to one day a week instead of two, in practice it was like having no cleaning on lots of blocks in the city,” the commissioner said. “Don’t get me wrong: that’s not for a lack of trying or care in the Sanitation Department. It is because the policy created a world where too many people saw a once-in-a-while ASP ticket as just the cost of doing business.”

The restoration is expected to “more than double the amount of cleaning that we can and will do,” she said.

The $11 million the city is shelling out to ramp up street sweeping will also affect cyclists, Tisch said at the briefing.

Sanitation crews will start cleaning protected bike lanes approximately once a week this summer, using narrow sweepers called “micromobility operation machines.”

“Micromobility operations machines were a huge hit during snow clearance last year, and we’re excited to announce the funding to modify them for sweeper duty,” she said.

In a statement released shortly after Tisch’s announcement, Mayor Eric Adams said the investment would allow the city to “come back stronger than ever.”

“We’re no longer just going to talk about cleaning up our streets or taking steps to fight climate change, but we’re going to actually put real money behind these initiatives and lead by example here in New York City,” Adams said.