Brooklyn residents call trucks parked on street a “quality of life issue”

Residents of a Brooklyn neighborhood are asking police to crack down on illegally parked semi trucks that they claim are negatively affecting their quality of life. 

The neighborhood in question is Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, and longtime residents say that the issue began in 2019 and got worse once the pandemic hit. Now, one anonymous resident says the trucks have started to stay parked along the street for extended periods of time. 

“There not parking them, they’re literally storing them there. They have a system where they pick each other up,” she told Brooklyn Paper. “You can go out there and scream all you want, they don’t care.”

The resident says that not only do the trucks take up parking spaces, but their drivers leave trash on the curbs. They say that the holidays exacerbated the issue, especially on the outskirts of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights near the Dyker Beach Golf Course on 86th Street at Seventh Avenue. 

“I used to run there and now I don’t go near that park. It’s disgusting,” the anonymous Bay Ridgeite said.“It’s a quality of life issue.” 

“This has been a very frustrating game of Whack-a-Mole,” said local Councilmember Justin Brannan, who says he has been trying to work with police and city agencies to fix the long-term parking issue since 2019. He says that consistent ticketing of the trucks has done little to change the situation. 

“Long term we are we are working with Maimonides Health and the NYC Department of Transportation to implement back-in angle parking along the golf course side from Poly Prep to the VA Hospital. This would kill two birds with one stone by providing more parking spots for residents and preventing trucks from parking here overnight,” he said. “In the meantime, we work closely with the NYPD to ticket, tow, and boot illegally parked vehicles on a regular basis.”

Year to date, their officers and Patrol Borough Brooklyn South have issued 6,875 summonses for illegally parked tractor trailers and towed 27 tractor trailers, according to a spokesperson for the NYPD.

“The NYPD along with our government partners at the Department of Transportation and Department of Citywide Administrative Services will continue to conduct joint operations and have robust enforcement summonsing and towing these violators and their vehicles to address the communities’ concerns,” the NYPD spokesperson said. 

Some officials say that the only thing that will stop the issue is providing appropriate parking for the truck drivers, who have nowhere else to go. 

“The city really needs to give these trucks a legal place to park,” Councilmember Brannan continued in a statement.  “That is the only solution.”

Brannan says he has teamed up with state senator Andrew Gounardes to form an illegal truck parking task force to assess the issue each month. 

“Our biggest concern is what may be housed in these trucks,” said former Assemblymember Pam Harris. “Also our loss of parking spaces at night and why is it ok that our quality of life can be disturb without any concern from the police department.”