> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Pedestrians and bicyclists spend more than drivers at local businesses in New York City [0].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.transalt.org/sites/default/files/news/reports/2012/EV_Shopper_Study.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.transalt.org/sites/default/files/news/reports/20...</a>
A must read classing for anyone interested in this topic:<p><i>The High Cost of Free Parking</i> by Donald Shoup<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193236496X" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...</a>
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.
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.
>><i>"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."</i><p>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.<p>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.<p>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."<p>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.
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).
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.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/BarmanNYC/status/1193229051609206784" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/BarmanNYC/status/1193229051609206784</a>
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.<p>14th St has removed all parking and auto traffic and the crosstown buses are very frequent even on a weekend and convenient.<p>A lot of traffic can be blocked by delivery trucks that are double parked on streets which have parking on both sides.<p>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.<p>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.<p>So basically, the actual people who live there, believe that even with all the difficulties cars are the best way to go?<p>And the city wants to .... make things harder for them?<p>That's pretty backwards.