Could New York City Eliminate Free Street Parking? | Hacker News Reader

Could New York City Eliminate Free Street Parking?

nytimes.com

52 pointsSilverwood45 comments

> Driving down any avenue, the traffic lanes have been diminished because of the bicycle lanes and the parking areas have been diminished because of the bike rentals. It’s punishing drivers.

Funny how drivers are willing to blame everyone except other cars. Walk down Canal or Broome around rush hour and it's pretty clear that the problem is not bike lanes (neither have them) but the fact that there are just too many cars for the amount of space available.

It will be interesting to see what happens with city politics after the next mayoral election. My sense on the ground is that political will from the non-driving majority is stronger and more organized than it has been in the past.

> My sense on the ground is that political will from the non-driving majority is stronger and more organized than it has been in the past.

This might be an unfair generalization, but I associate pro-car sentiments with older conservative voters, who unfortunately do turn out to elections more strongly. The outer burroughs certainly elect in that direction.

You never hear a peep about street parking in the NY Times unless it can be framed as some sort of existential class struggle question and great historical social justice dilemma, all or nothing.

Meanwhile there are some 140000 "parking placards" in NYC that are abused with great abandon by a privileged class of state workers to park wherever the fuck they want, with enforcement curiously missing. Here is a tip for an aspiring writer: don't try to condense an issue into a single column and inevitably come up with the 100 year old quotes of the plight of the struggling minimum wage worker, find a detail and research that.

You mean like these three articles on it from the NYT?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/nyregion/parking-placards...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/nyregion/parking-ticket-s...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/nyregion/the-new-math-of-...

Pedestrians and bicyclists spend more than drivers at local businesses in New York City [0].

[0] https://www.transalt.org/sites/default/files/news/reports/20...

While this is a helpful point, I think it would be nice if this issue were framed more in terms of physical and mental health, not just as a question of how to optimise economic output. We need less cars for almost every possible reason you can think of.

I want to make a point. There should be no concern that The War on Cars harms the economy of New York City. It is a claim without evidence.

I agree. But I would also counter that it is worth killing cars even if there were a measurable negative economic impact, because of all the clear benefits we would gain in exchange for it. But of course even these subtler benefits (like mental and physical health), would necessarily result in improved economic output overall.

Your article says people with cars spend less, not nothing.

So in fact reduces fares would have a negative economic impact.

Maybe richer people drive bikes?

This might be "Wet roads cause rain"

A must read classing for anyone interested in this topic:

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup

https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...

What makes this a must read?

Donald Shoup, a UCLA professor, is one of the few academics who has been studying the economics of parking and is considered THE authority on the subject.

More than residential parking, I feel that double-parking for deliveries, drop-off/pickup, etc. is a major contributor to traffic and congestion. I like the idea mentioned of flex-zones that can be used for different purposes and perhaps address some of these concerns. Unfortunately, allocating parking spaces is a zero-sum game.

> double-parking for deliveries, drop-off/pickup, etc. is a major contributor to traffic and congestion

If half the street weren’t off limits due to parked cars, traffic could easily route around such disruptions.

In New York owning a car is a huge luxury, the city is giving away free real estate to the richest of the rich New Yorkers. Getting rid of free street parking is a great idea.

You must not visit Queens, Bronx or Manhattan beyond 110 very often. They have extensive car ownership. I don't think anyone would call them rich.

True, we should be careful to not conflate "Manhattan" with "New York City".

That said, I agree with OP's comment within the context of Manhattan. Anyone who owns a car there is very wealthy, even within the context of a wealthy city.

(I don't agree with pegging the divide at 110th street, that's much too low.)

Anecdotal, but my relatives who live/grew up in the outer boroughs call Manhattan “the city”.

Thats only if you live in NYC you refer to Manhattan as "the city" but we very well know that New York City consist of all 5 boroughs

Yeah good point, I should have specified UES/UWS or below

Charging is not going to fix that problem. If anything, the closer you get to charging market rates, the less accessible it becomes to anyone other than the richest of the rich. At least with free parking all vehicle owners are on an equal footing regardless of how much disposable income they have.

Not that I'm advocating free parking. I'm not. But this isn't a good argument against it.

To me, the problem is giving away publicly owned land to people who don't need handouts. Charging market rates fixes that problem.

market rates for parking would still unequitably favor the wealthy. to be equitable, parking fees would need to be wealth-weighted/income-based.

you're missing the part where only the wealthy are using these spaces in the first place (speaking specifically about Manhattan)

Should we also charge for the parks and schools in rich neighborhoods?

62% of households in Queens and 44% of households in Brooklyn own a vehicle [0].

[0] https://edc.nyc/article/new-yorkers-and-their-cars

Yes, the “parking is free real estate for the wealthy” idea is really a manhattan thing, but those numbers aren’t doing you any favors - that’s far and away the lowest proportion of car ownership in the country.

https://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-...

>>"In Chicago, neighborhood parking costs residents $25 a year; in Los Angeles, as much as $34; in Washington, $35; and in Portland, Ore., $75. In Boston, a pass for neighborhood parking is free, but officials are considering charging people with one car $25, and more for second and third cars."

The area highlighted in the article is the Upper West Side in Manhattan, which is a primarily residential area and not a commercial area that will be subject to a 2021 congestion toll. I don't know of any data that tracks the breakdown of outsider vs. resident cars, but generally I feel that the majority of cars who "cruise an average of seven blocks [...] before they find an empty space" will not be impacted much if residential parking permits are issued.

In fact, residential parking permits would probably still result in the same problems mentioned in the article: double-parked vehicles during the day, remnants of a car-centric culture, and residents desperately circling for free parking spots. The one benefit of a parking permit would be an increase in city revenue.

This is sort of addressed in the article where "residential parking fees in other cities have not been a panacea, in part because neighborhood permits usually do not deal with the supply-and-demand problem — too many cars for the number of spaces."

You could force residents to pay for garages which generally charge $700+ per month to store a sedan (more for SUVs), but then we keep hearing how such policies favour the rich and wealthy because they disadvantage residents who need vehicles to drive to work every day.

Nobody who lives on the Upper West Side is driving to work. They circle looking for spots when they have to move their cars for street cleaning and when the get back Sunday night from their country houses.

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/07/05/new-york-is-really-aw...

Car ownership is prevelant everywhere, not just the "rich" neighborhoods. Come visit Harlem, Inwood, Bronx and Queens.

Cars are prevalent because they take up a lot of space, but car ownership is not. Not even 25% of people in Manhattan own car. Even in Staten Island 17% of people don't have a car.

https://blog.tstc.org/2017/04/21/car-free-new-york-city/

as an UWSer who does not know anyone with a "country residence" or who can afford a second residence at all given the exorbitant price of living in this city, there are plenty of other reasons for people to take the car out in the middle of the day on a summer weekend like, say, going to a beach with your chairs and cooler etc which isn't something you can do with public transit, or going hiking someplace not right off a train line, or any number of things that ordinary non-super-rich people do.

Sure, but every time NYC "car culture" questions come up, people start wringing their hands about people who need to drive to work. If we're talking NYC that's a low percentage of people who do drive to work (whether they need to is another question) and for the Upper West Side (say, zipcodes 10023, 10024, 10025) very low, 6%-7%.

http://zipatlas.com/us/ny/zip-code-comparison/percentage-pop...

It is less compelling to say that people need free curbside parking so they can go to the Catskills, whether they have a house there or not.

I would certainly support resident parking permits. I don't think many people need to commute into the UWS for work by car, since of course the entire neighborhood is hooked up to transit endpoints that have their own parking, which is not necessarily true for the places that UWSers commute to.

My city (NOT New York City) did residential parking in a couple of areas. It helped eliminate the issue of certain workers in nearby-ish businesses stalking residents.

But, parking still sucks, and it hurt businesses significantly. Probably half of the restaurants in the area that I'm thinking of closed down after the parking change. Although the rules are fairly lenient (2-hour parking is permitted in most places), people just stay away.

Parking sucks because in this city there's no permitting for housing units and no actual way to limit or have costs associated with permits. You just need to prove residency -- so you may be one of 12 tenants in a "two family" building.

Given how bizarre the US is, I suspect the only option in most cases is to assign the rights to spaces to the adjacent buildings and then use them as a factor in value and therefore local tax.

Once this is done, there's no place to park at virtually everyone's destination and a few people end up paying a lot up front and in tax for multiple spaces while everyone else gives up on cars..

The end result is a much more substantial effective road tax while avoiding all the reasonable compromises.

I doubt it.

The big problem here is that you have well-intentioned, intelligent people who are ultimately correct re: cars. Then you have reality, where millions people are dependent on them, and trillions in wealth are based on ready access to cars.

In a democracy, the magic and challenge of governance is balancing the long term needs of society with the current needs of the electorate. For this issue, that means the solutions and the implementation will be messy.

Ideally the city would have to have the courage to assign permits to individual blocks and create permit-only zones that fit the entire number of permits granted, with temporary parking only allowed in a small number of parking spots remaining outside those zones. And it should be hundreds of dollars a year at a minimum -- or even better, auctioned off, which would almost certainly be a thousand or more a year in many neighborhoods.

But nevertheless, increasing city revenue is nothing to sneeze at -- since it will presumably either lower taxes for the rest of us or delay otherwise inevitable increases.

Because the majority of non-car-owning New Yorkers shouldn't be subsidizing residential car owners, which is what happens right now. Car owners should be paying market rate for their parking space, just like I pay market rate for my apartment space.

I live in Europe, but I see no reason why parking space would be free. I also don't see a reason why a part of the street should be used parking when they are built for driving. I am not an eco-nazi, I use a car and a motorcycle, but they are always parked either on my property at home, in the shopping mall parking (cost included in the price of the products I buy) or in the parking at the office (which the employer already considers as a cost when paying me a salary).

It's a function of the urban design. In neighborhoods that are planned around residences having off-street parking, it's not necessary, and many have a blanket "no overnight street parking" rule.

In others, almost no residences have off street parking and there are few if any commercial garages, so everyone parks on the street. Reducing the curb space available for parking forces the least patient street parkers to give up their cars.

If we could do a reset, there's no way people would choose to allocate around half of public space just for cars. And especially when a significant portion of that is space taken up by empty cars that are serving no one. We should abolish almost all street parking in the city.

https://twitter.com/BarmanNYC/status/1193229051609206784

On-street parking is sanctioned littering. People should not be allowed to litter giant cars on the streets.

I live and work in Manhattan and there is a great deal of traffic congestion that could be fixed by removing parking spaces on streets that have 1. dedicated bus lanes. 2. bike lanes.

14th St has removed all parking and auto traffic and the crosstown buses are very frequent even on a weekend and convenient.

A lot of traffic can be blocked by delivery trucks that are double parked on streets which have parking on both sides.

One reason is that the trucks are too wide for the city streets. There should be a mandated by law maximum width on delivery trucks for NYC that are no wider than an SUV or other wide car. Instead of making the trucks wide, make them long and narrow.

That way, even if the delivery trucks like Fedex, UPS, Freshdirect, etc are double parked, they don't block the entire street.

> But even as the number of parking spaces has shrunk, the numbers of cars has risen.

So basically, the actual people who live there, believe that even with all the difficulties cars are the best way to go?

And the city wants to .... make things harder for them?

That's pretty backwards.

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