Return of alternate side parking has NYC in tight squeeze

Nothing drives frustration like keeping a car on the street in NYC.

Alternate side parking has been the scourge of city drivers for the better part of a century — and it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

NYC has opted to reinstate two-day-a-week ASP on July 5, after pausing the painful policy in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic. For two years now, drivers around the Big Apple have enjoyed once-a-week street cleaning, which means fewer morning car moves. Now, hundreds of city-dwellers have already signed an online petition to put the new ruling in reverse.

The full return of ASP won’t just be like going back to the pre-COVID days either — there’s a significantly higher amount of cars in town now.

From August to October in 2020, car registrations rose 76% in Manhattan and 45% in Brooklyn, the New York Times reported.

And outdoor dining sheds have exacerbated the issue by eating up parking spaces.

Boerum Hill resident Ian Moubayed told The Post that he’s been feeling the crunch.

“It gets so competitive now, everybody is more aggressive in the last year since people started coming back to the city,” he said.

Like many New Yorkers, filmmaker Moubayed will wait out the ASP hour in his car — bringing work to do or a good book — then jump back into his original spot once the street sweeper has passed.

But in April, things nearly came to blows with the driver of a blue Tesla over an alternate side spot not far from Smith and Hoyt streets.

After he pulled out to let the dust truck do its thing, the Tesla “violated the unwritten rules of the road” by doing a “nose dive” towards the space Moubayed was waiting for, he said.

So the longtime Brooklynite clapped right back by pulling his 2009 Audi A6 in a jamming position, leaving the asphalt adversaries in a deadlock. It was only when a cop behind the Tesla blared his siren, forcing the car to move, that Moubayed earned his racing stripes and the spot to go along with it. He proudly claimed victory in a tweet.

“Then he got out of his car and came up to my window and started cussing at me, he called me a c- -t … I was just like, ‘F- -k you, man.’ I don’t give a s- -t. I was fuming for a half hour after going at it with him,” Moubayed said.

“It was the most New York-centric parking incident I had ever been a part of,” he added, saying the two day return will be “terrible.”

Even when fists aren’t flying, there’s plenty of rage on the road thanks to the parking rules, according to West Village resident Richie Romero, who owns Zazzy’s Pizza — a Manhattan chain he frequently has to drive to.

“Now I’m going to have move my car four times a week … [The news] literally ruined my summer. I already spend such an obnoxious [amount of] time trying to park,” said Romero, calling ASP a “middle class tax.”

The pizzeria proprietor has a special system to make room on the crowded streets. “I’ll have friends get out of my car to move motorcycles, Revels and scooters so I can fit in a spot,” he said.

That’s one of many tactics used by aggressive drivers, Astoria resident Elena Dimkaros explained.

“People will stand in spaces to guard them or put cones down to try and stop someone from parking,” said Dimkaros, who has been parking on the streets of Queens for eight years. “It gets overwhelming.”

Others aren’t looking for for parking loopholes, and rather are “giving up” on driving in NYC. Among them is Astoria resident Vicky Poumpouridis, who lives down the road from Dimkaros.

“I’ll try to go to Broadway [in Queens] and spend 40 minutes trying to park and just come back home to go somewhere in walking distance,” she said, adding that outdoor dining areas have only exacerbated the problem.

Although Poumpouridis has a garage, she’s not keen on ASP coming back. “NYC is becoming very inhospitable and challenging. People aren’t being cut any breaks and it really wears you down after a while,” she said.

On the other side of the street, some residents support the twice-a-week resurgence.

Floral designer Sibel Mermelstein and nail studio owner Kira Philips griped about how much garbage lingers outside of their businesses’ neighboring storefronts on East 80th Street between Second and Third Avenues on the Upper East Side.

“Cars don’t even move for the street sweeper anyway so they don’t even get most of the garbage … my cigarette butt from three weeks ago is still there,” Philips said, pointing at a row of automobiles which remained stationary for days at a time.

What they’ve seen is happening citywide. An estimated 50% of city drivers don’t move their cars for ASP, sanitation commissioner Jessica Tisch announced last month, expressing that the full return will force drivers into actually moving their cars.

“The policy created a world where too many people saw a once-in-a-while ASP ticket as just the cost of doing business … it went on for far too long, and it largely sidelined the most effective clean-streets tool we have in our arsenal: the mechanical broom.”

Shop owners like Mermelstein say it’s about darn time.

“I waited my whole life to be able to finally open my store in February. Now I have to literally hose down my sidewalk every day to get rid of the smell left by the garbage,” she said. “We’re all for New York being back, but New York needs to have our back too.”