For all the challenges of having a car in New York City, drivers here seem to enjoy one quirk: parking in the middle of the road with impunity.

Technically, the law says that “double parking of passenger vehicles is illegal at all times, including when street cleaning is occurring, regardless of location, purpose or duration.”

It’s also true that by double parking — that is, parking parallel to another car that’s up against the curb, often for the purpose of making way for a street sweeper, loading or unloading your car or popping into a store — you run the risk of causing an accident, prompting a 311 complaint or waking a baby because someone leaned on their horn for 10 minutes to get your attention.

(On some occasions, you can even get a $115 ticket — more on that later.)

But look down virtually any street and you’ll see that despite the ample amount of free curbside real estate dedicated to car owners (who make up less than half of city households), drivers have largely decided that “a parking spot” is wherever they want it to be.

While double parking is — we’ll say it again — illegal, we’ve identified a few ways that drivers who care about manners go about it.

Read the full story at Gothamist.com.