Most everyone has a traffic ticket story. Few end like this.
New York City has agreed to pay delivery truck companies $14 million to settle a federal lawsuit which alleges that the city wrongfully hauled in millions of dollars’ worth of traffic fines, according to The New York Daily News.
The New York Trucking and Delivery Association filed a class action suit about five years ago in Brooklyn Federal Court on behalf of commercial delivery truck companies that they say were wrongfully ticketed and fined.
From May 2006 to October 2010 traffic NYTDA says that traffic ticket cops issued traffic obstruction tickets in lieu of double-parking tickets. NYTDA says the city did that to get around a 2004 program which prohibits ticketing a double-parked delivery truck, unless a parking space is available within 100 feet of the truck, or if the truck has been parked without any apparent business activity for over a half-hour. Over that four-year period, the city raked in $14 million in traffic obstruction fines.
So long as they’re making deliveries beyond 14th Street to 60th Street and First Avenue to Eighth Avenue, the Stipulated Fine Program permits delivery trucks to legally double park.
A federal judge still must approve of the settlement which would compensate anyone who “owned a New York State registered commercial vehicle and were members of the stipulated fine program who received a ticket for a traffic lane violation between June 1, 2006, and Oct. 31, 2010, requiring them to pay a $40 fine.”
