Upper East Side Street Sweeper Dance
If you own a car and store it on the streets of New York City you probably don't realize how much you directly harm the environment.
Glenn McAnanama of Upper Green Side explains the chain reaction of the consequence of free on-street parking, what it means to the health of New Yorkers and how it all contributes to world greenhouse emissions.
Glenn McAnanama:
[00:08] So New York City has a policy where everyday a street cleaner
comes on one side of the street to clean that, and the cars all have
to move out of the way of the street cleaner. It’s usually about
an hour and a half, or 90 minutes, that the cars can’t be parked on
one side of the street. A lot of them will just go and take a
spin or do one of their errands for the day, which they could probably
do by walking instead of driving. A lot of the other people will
double park, simply go across the street and double park. And
what they’ll do is they’ll sit in their car and if it’s any kind
of inclement weather, they’ll just stay in their car idling with either
the air conditioner or the heat on. Cars that are idling create
pollution, not only that goes up into the atmosphere and affects the
greenhouse effect, but also creates ground level pollution that can
affect asthma and other respiratory diseases. It’s just a waste
of time. Obviously we’re all busy in New York and 90 minutes
out of anyone’s day seems to be a lot. But what this is is,
this is because if they were to bring their car to a garage, they would
probably have to pay upwards of $300 a month. So really these
are people who are using their time to save money and basically get
free parking from the rest of us.
