Placard abuse was robbing the city of $46 million each year in parking fees and generating nearly 20,000 daily car trips in and out of Manhattan.
In March 2007 OpenPlans and Transportation Alternatives unveiled UncivilServants, a site that invited the public to submit photos of illegally parked cars with government placards.
The site is powered by software developed by Greg Whalin for the popular cycling advocacy site MyBikeLane.com.
In its first week the site attracted the attention of 100,000 visitors and virtually every local media outlet.
UncivilServants succeeded because it invited citizens to help identify the problem in order to solve it, quickly crowdsourcing data that is usually obtained via expensive, drawn out government studies. It tapped into the collective discontentment of pedestrian and cycling advocates who saw the abuse of public space every day. It also welcomed open debate in its forums – visitors who identified themselves as NYPD were frequent commenters.
This simple website had a huge impact. Exactly one year after the launch of Uncivil Servants, Mayor Bloomberg announced a major overhaul in city government parking privileges, centralizing control of placard distribution and eliminating more than 25,000 official parking placards, a 32% reduction.
Learn More
- Debate Over A Website About Parking – The New York Times
- Things Heating Up Over At Uncivil Servants – Streetsblog
- City Hall To Reduce Parking Placards by 20% and Centralize Control – Streetsblog
- My Bike Lane – Bike lane violations from around the world!