NEW YORK — The Associated Press — On a narrow street in lower Manhattan’s financial district, Godvell Merilus pulls his UPS truck alongside a curb and parks illegally.

Like the nearby Poland Spring and FedEx drivers, Merilus doesn’t have a choice. There are no legal spaces, and he has a demanding schedule to keep, delivering hundreds of packages to corporations such as Goldman Sachs and Citibank.

Then the inevitable comes wrapped in a blaze-orange envelope: Merilus gets a $115 parking ticket, one of four he receives this day. “It’s automatic,” said Merilus, 34. “There is not a single day I don’t get a summons.”

UPS, FedEx and other commercial delivery companies pay a steep price for doing business in New York City, getting an average of 7,000 parking tickets every day and paying more than $102 million in fines in the city’s latest budget year.

Atlanta-based UPS has a fleet of 1,000 trucks and receives about 15,000 tickets a month here. The company is the biggest offender in the city, paying $18.7 million in parking violations for the fiscal year ending June 30, according to city data. Memphis-based FedEx was second with $8.2 million.

“We receive by far more parking fines in New York City than anywhere else in the world,” UPS spokeswoman Diane Hatcher said. “Simply stated, we don’t have the same level of difficulty with finding available parking spaces or loading zones anywhere else.”

Dealing with all the parking violations turned into such a bureaucratic nightmare for the city that it created a program that reduces or dismisses the tickets in exchange for a company waiving its right to contest them. The program has eliminated 770,000 ticket hearings and saved $1 million in administrative costs per year since it was started two years ago.

The companies are also saving cash, although their annual New York City parking tab is still high because not every type of ticket is covered under the program.