(New York, NY - Jim O'Grady, WNYC) Despite the Bloomberg administration's 2008 crackdown on counterfeit and improperly used parking placards, a new report say the city's system of issuing and overseeing the permits "remains broken."

Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group, found 57 percent of placards examined on the dashboards of vehicles in five New York business districts were either legal placards used illegally, or outright fakes. The rate of bogus placards is 95 percent in the courthouse area of Lower Manhattan, the report says, where only 11 of 244 placards surveyed were being properly used.

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The report's authors claim one in four of the 1,450 permits examined was a fake. They go on to extrapolate from the city's current claim of 78,000 legal placards that anywhere from 10,000 to 25,000 fraudulent placards are now in use by drivers. To give scale to those numbers, there are 12,000 yellow cabs in New York. The report says placard abuse in the courthouse area has actually increased since the group last studied the issue in 2007.

In 2008, Mayor Bloomberg directed every city agency to reduce its parking placards by 20 percent. He also centralized the issuance of placards to the New York Police Department and Department of Transportation. The city's best guess at the time was there were 150,000 to 170,000 parking permits in use--and those were just the legal ones.

"Parking placards are a necessary tool for conducting City business, but we have no tolerance for their abuse, which contributes to congestion," said Mayor Bloomberg at the time. "We will give out placards only to those who need to use them to further the public interest."

Apparently, that is a goal only partly realized. Transportation Alternatives researchers, who canvassed five busy neighborhoods in January, say they found a stubborn pattern of abuse. Bogus placards included official-looking permits unrecognized by the city, photocopies of real permits, expired permits and personal effects used as permits: transit vests, patrol manuals and even a sheet of paper scrawled with the letters "NYPD." Drivers typically used the bogus placards to double-park or leave their vehicles on sidewalks or in bike or bus lanes.

The report says the entire placard system once again needs an overhaul: "Each step in the process—from creation of the permits, to distribution and enforcement—is fatally flawed, creating a system wrought with abuse and lacking effective oversight."

Mayoral spokesman Stu Loeser disagreed. He said the city has cut the number of placards in half and works hard at enforcement. "Working with the Internal Affairs Bureau, the NYPD regularly tows cars using placards inappropriately," he said in and email. "In terms of fake placards, they get ticketed."

And city officials added that since the NYPD established its special Internal Affairs Bureau Placard enforcement program in April 2008, it has issued 28,000 summonses, towed 6,000 vehicles, and arrested 32 people for unauthorized use or duplication of official placards.

Transportation Alternatives says the best way to insure proper use of the placards would be to stamp each one with a bar code that could be scanned by traffic enforcement agents.

Read TA's Parking Placard Report.