A New York City sanitation vehicle was hit with its own neon-green “shame sticker” by a fed-up driver in an apparent act of parking-rule payback.
The giant adhesive placard turned up on a Department of Sanitation car parked on a sidewalk beside rows of townhouses, Catherina Gioino, a news editor for Fortune, posted on X Monday. The image showed the bright sticker plastered on a DSNY vehicle window, the same punitive tag the agency has been slapping on civilian cars since August.
“This was not affixed by a DSNY employee. It appears to be a case of a disgruntled car owner peeling off their own sticker and putting it on a DSNY vehicle,” a DSNY spokesperson said. The spokesperson did not identify the driver or say whether the incident was caught on camera.
City officials brought back the “shame stickers” this summer after Manhattan Councilwoman Gale Brewer sponsored legislation to repeal a decade-long ban on the practice. The nagging adhesives are meant to humiliate drivers who repeatedly ignore alternate-side parking rules and block street sweepers.
The unsightly placards have drawn fierce pushback from New Yorkers and lawmakers. Critics argue that sticking them to car windows amounts to vandalism, and that scraping them off is a genuine nuisance. The fine print at the bottom of each sticker instructs vehicle owners to use “warm water and a scraper” for removal.
“We remind all car owners that these stickers are a tool to encourage people to move their cars in accordance with the law so that our street sweepers can deliver the clean curblines that all New Yorkers deserve,” the DSNY spokesperson added. The spokesperson also used Monday’s incident to renew a longstanding agency plea: “Our hope remains that Albany will pass a bill that allows automated camera enforcement so that we do not have to use these stickers.”
Assembly Member Steven Raga and state Sen. Julia Salazar have both put their names on legislation to crack down on parking violations through automated camera enforcement. That technology, known as ACE, already operates on MTA buses to ticket vehicles in bus lanes, double-parked cars along bus routes, and vehicles blocking bus stops.
The Monday sidewalk sighting marks a role reversal for the controversial program, with a civilian turning the city’s own enforcement tool against one of its vehicles. Whether the sticker-sticker faced any consequences remains unclear.