Alternate Side Parking Today

Alternate-side parking is one of those NYC rituals that comes up almost daily for drivers. The system exists to let the Department of Sanitation (DSNY) clean the gutters — every block has cleaning rules posted on its curb signs, typically a 90-minute or two-hour window on certain days ("Mon Thu 9:30 a.m. – 11 a.m." is the standard format). During that window, parked cars must move to the opposite side of the street. After the window ends, cars can come back.

That's the daily mechanic. The complication that this tool exists to handle is the calendar overlay: roughly 60 to 70 days a year, NYC DOT publishes a suspension that waives the rules entirely. On a suspension day, cars can stay put even during the normally-posted cleaning window. The 2026 calendar has 67 planned suspensions across 39 distinct dates, which is why the "should I move my car today?" question has a real, recurring answer that's worth a quick check before you head out at 9 a.m.

The Major Legal Holiday distinction (and why it matters for meters)

Not all suspensions are equal. NYC DOT's annual calendar marks six dates as Major Legal Holidays (MLH): New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. On these days, alternate-side parking is suspended and parking meters are also free. The verbatim PDF text from DOT: "On MAJOR LEGAL HOLIDAYS, stopping, standing and parking are permitted except in areas where stopping, standing and parking rules are in effect seven days a week (for example, ‘No Standing Anytime’). Accordingly, parking meters will not be in effect on major legal holidays."

The other 30+ suspension days (Lunar New Year, Eid al-Fitr, Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Diwali, etc.) are religious or cultural observances. On those days, alternate-side rules are suspended but parking meters remain in effect. You still need to feed the meter at your block's metered spots; you just don't need to move for street cleaning.

The tool surfaces a "Major Legal Holiday" callout when the day applies, so you know whether the meter rules are also off. The data point is encoded directly in the DOT-published ICS file's description field — we parse it rather than maintaining a separate MLH list.

Suspended vs in-effect vs no-rules-today

The status pill at the top of the page shows one of three states, and the distinction matters more than it sounds:

In effect.Your block's normal cleaning rules apply today. You need to move your car during the posted window. This is the default state on most weekdays.

Suspended.Today is a DOT-published suspension day (holiday or religious observance). Don't move your car; the cleaning sweeper won't come. Other parking rules (No Stopping Anytime, No Parking Here to Corner, hydrant zones) still apply — "ASP suspended" is not "all parking rules suspended."

No rules today.Your block's posted ASP rules don't include today at all. For the overwhelming majority of NYC blocks, this is Sundays — no ASP. Some blocks have ASP only one day a week; the other days are "no rules today."

The reason "suspended" and "no rules today" are tracked separately is that NYC parking tickets get issued by patrol officers who occasionally get the call wrong. If you receive a ticket for failing to move on a DOT-published suspension day, fight it — the official calendar is the legal record, and tickets issued in violation of an announced suspension are routinely dismissed on appeal.

What the tool does not cover (and why)

Three categories of parking questions are deliberately out of scope:

Emergency suspensions. Snow days, parade closures, water-main breaks, downed-tree events — any suspension NYC announces in real time — are not surfaced by this tool. The static annual calendar handles ~95% of the question (the planned holiday set) but weather-driven suspensions require the city's own real-time channels. The 311 API exists but, in the words of the community-maintained Python library that tracks it, "the source API is a mess of poorly named statuses" and returns "NO INFORMATION" non-deterministically. Building a public ad-supported tool on top of an undocumented, unreliable endpoint risks showing incorrect "not suspended" data the day a snow storm hits — exactly when users would actually rely on it. We point users at NYC 311 and the free NotifyNYC SMS alert system for the emergency channel — those are the authoritative real-time sources.

Street-by-street sign rules.The tool tells you whether ASP is suspended citywide; it doesn't tell you what the sign in front of your specific building says. Building a street-by-street parking sign database requires DSNY's per-segment cleaning schedule (which exists as an open-data CSV) joined to NYC DOT's parking-sign placement data (which is incomplete and updated manually). That's a much larger project and a different kind of tool.

Meter rates and time-of-day rules.We surface the meter status as a binary (suspended on MLH days, in-effect otherwise) but don't render block-level rate variations, time-of-day commercial loading zones, or vendor-permit exceptions. Use ParkNYC or the city's ParkSmart resources for those specifics.

Practical tips from drivers

A few habits that NYC drivers have learned the hard way:

Move the night before, not the morning of. Once the "double-park is OK because cleaning's about to start" window opens (typically 30 minutes before the posted cleaning time), spots open up on the opposite side. Move then and you can sleep in. The bigger mistake is the opposite: leaving the car parked overnight on a Tuesday assuming you'll wake up in time on Wednesday for the 9 a.m. window, then sleeping through it.

Check the suspension calendar weekly. Plenty of NYC drivers have moved their car at 8:30 a.m. on a day that was actually a published suspension — painful, irreversible, and avoidable. Bookmark this page and check it before you move.

If you double-park during cleaning, stay with the car.Double-parking is technically illegal at all times in NYC (per the DOT calendar small print), but is tolerated during the cleaning window once the sweeper has passed. Tolerated only if you're in the driver's seat — Sanitation can write tickets for unattended double-parked vehicles even mid-cleaning.

The garage math is often better than people think. Monthly garages run $400-$700 in most NYC neighborhoods, $800+ in Manhattan. If you value your time at any reasonable rate, the cumulative cost of moving the car twice a week, getting one ticket a year, and burning half an hour finding a spot every time you come home is often higher than the garage. Worth running the math honestly.

The full sourcing and re-verification schedule for the calendar data is on the parking methodology page.