On Demand
Park Like a Rock Star
Monday, December 10, 2007
Donald Shoup, Los Angeles' renowned parking reformer and UCLA professor of urban planning, takes to the streets of New York to tame traffic. His solution? Higher rates for on-street parking.
Professor Shoup's website
His New York Times editorial about parking in NYC
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hey,
what about charging for overnight parking by permit only effectively engineering a reduction in the auto population?
As a small business owner who makes stops all over the city, I spend more time looking for legal parking spots than working on some of my worst days. My suggestion would be to make all city parking spots south of 96th street metered parking. To avoid the need to feed the meter every one or two hours, I would allow the meters on residential blocks to be paid for the day. Commercial parking is even worse and trucks would have no need for triple parking on the avenues if those meters were exclusively for commercial vehicles.
THis sounds a bit like intellectual nonsense. Some of us just need to drive because the public transportation opportunities do not work for us, or are not very available, or we work inopportune times, or we need to carry things with us, or we go multiple places, or cant afford public transportation. For me, public transportation to NYC from Nyack changes a commute from 1 hour each way to 2.5 hours, and costs far more than the bridge toll and gas. If you want to raise parking prices, you only make it even more hard for people like me to come into NYC to enjoy its resources.
Funny how the world works. As part of an academic research proposal I just used "The High Cost of Free Parking" as theoretical framework to conduct policy research on alternative methods in revenue collection in Orange County, Florida.
What about the majority of spaces in park slope that aren't metered? I've always assumed that people who cruised were looking for long term off street parking, not short term at the meters?
Is the guest proposing resident parking permits?
Brian and Prof. Shoup just talked whether parking reform could hurt businesses--but remember, here in NYC, most businesses that depend on visitors get most of their business from non-motorists! This wouldn't hurt many businesses, I don't think.
You have all the market information you need to determine how much to raise the meter rate to: an amount close to the nearby garage rate! Check the vacancy rate at the garage to adjust the meter rates accordingly at various times of the day.
One problem raising the rates by a large amount would engender: side streets with no meters would see even more "cruising" for empty spots.
Well intentions, but this is nonsense. We pay the highest taxes in the country and now he wants us to pay more for parking. His ideas are way off the mark! Do not invite him back.
I don't see how that makes ANY sense. You don't reduce the number of people trying to park by making parking more expensive...not logical.
They're not going to stop driving because you raise the price .50 or $1.00; they're just going to have to pay more. If parking in a garage is
$20.00 an hour, people will "drive around looking for parking" until the street rates hit $15.00...
don't you think?
What about permit parking local residents?
Could someone Donald if he knows what public reaction captured through polls to higher parking rates typically has been? Chambers of commerces typically are against high parking but in his book Donald says a 15% turnover attracts consumers with the allure of reasonable parking.
This guy is a complete and utter moron...can we please have NEW YORKERS only deal with this issue?
He lived here for a year and only parked on the street for "3 days" i.e. he can afford to pay for an expensive Manhattan garage. Let's hear from someone else who is more in touch with the majority of New Yorkers please...
why is everyone being so hostile to this guy? he's 100% completely right. geesh. the price of onstreet parking SHOULD go up - his ideas make perfect sense.
No one is parking on the SIDEWALK on 77th Street. The rental car companies there may be doing so illegally as they move their stock around but the residents are not. Bad research leads to bad policy. Fix LA and then call us...we spend less time driving than they do...let them emulate our mass transit system.
"human shields"? So by acknowledging that the first group of people who are going to be unwilling or unable to pay is the poor, we're pushing them out in the conversation to protect our own interests? This man lives in a bubble... a bubble in Los Angeles at that.
I don't think your guest understands the realities of New York City.
1. yes, New Yorkers do have cars.
2. people are not driving into neighborhoods necessarily to shop. they live in the neighborhood and need to park.
3. deliveries are a huge problem, whether it's for a store or because someone is moving or ... NYPS or UPS...
this is much different than LA
Improve public transportation in the boroughs!
It was strange that you mention parking in Park Slope and alternate side parking and didn't mention the practice of double parking on the opposite side during ASP hours with 0% chance of being ticketed or towed. This practice is very dangerous for bicyclists. The city needs to stop catering to car owners.
Parking meters just went up on the upper west side. The Muni meters installation made parking go from 1.50 to 2.00 or 33%. Hasn't changed anything except maybe made room for a couple more cars by getting rid of the spaces defined by meters rather than size of cars.
I do not have a car, but free parking benefits me. I know a few friends (very few) who own cars, and they are the first people I turn to when I need to move furniture, etc. My friends are more than willing to help out, but don't make much money and probably wouldn't be able to afford to keep a car if they had to pay for a parking spot.
I'm going to sound like a right-winger here and back the very capitalist and very logical idea of the guest that if parking is at a premium on the street, then you should charge more for parking to discourage people from doing it in order to keep spaces open througout the day.
I don't see how anyone--poor, rich, or in-between--is served by cheap on-street parking when there are no free spaces.
If you don't have the money for parking, then don't park. That's part of the cost of living. And, yes, those with more money can afford to park more. This is just not an issue where it's worthwhile to get bogged down over who has more money (there are plenty of other issues, like health care, where that debate is much more relevant).
And it seems to me this idea makes so much more sense in NYC than in, say, the Twin Cities since NYC has a massive public transit system.
I live in Sunnyside and we ABSOLUTELY need to have resident permit parking. Our spaces are constantly taken up by those driving in from Long Island and eastern Queens in order to park for free or for the cheap spots under the 7 line. Any neighborhood near a subway line is prone to this problem. Sell permits to residents, increase the number of spots under the 7 (there are lots that for some reason are fenced off and unavailable).
Also, increasing meter rates by $1 or $2 will make NO difference. If a person can afford to have a car in NYC, then they are more than willing to pay $5, $10 or $15 to park. Let's face it, the only real way to prevent the "cruising for a parking spot" traffic is to prohibit parking completely near subways and leave the street spots for resident parking permits.
Actually, I think we should eliminate more on-street parking – whether free or metered, it’s a waste of public space. Why not make one side of every street and avenue a dedicated bike lane? Increased cycling is good for the environment and would help alleviate congestion on the subways and streets. A dedicated bike lane (the width of a parked car) wouldn’t interfere with traffic flow or delivery and lost income from parking tickets and meters could easily be made up by the NYPD actually enforcing the speed limit and other traffic violations.
For car- owning city residents, there should be “resident” parking permits to guarantee that highly sought after spots go to those who actually live in the neighborhood.
And yes, we desperately need to improve public transportation in the boroughs and suburbs so that people can leave their cars at home.
What in the world does paying taxes have to do with getting free on-street parking? You pay taxes so you get free libraries, not free parking. Parking has value, and those who use it should be the ones who pay. There's no constitutional right to possess a car; you have to pay for the car, for the insurance, for the repairs, for the oil and gas, and yes, sorry, for the parking, if it's in short supply.
Comments were made about Paris, which is far from perfect. But here's how it works: most streets with businesses have metered parking only, at a fairly high price. There are delivery zones that are free but that are normally to used only to load or unload. In residential streets, parking is metered as on commercial streets (for visitors, for example), but residents with a pass can park for a nominal fee for the day. On days with high pollution, residential parking is free. Repair and tradespeople and shopkeepers have special passes that allow them to park in residential areas for deliveries and repairs.
There really isn't much to debate here. This issue, like congestion pricing, is all about the class interests of the wealthy to sustain their tax free existence by creating a fee based tax system which has an almost infinite capacity to extract ever more taxes (dressed up as fees) from middle and lower income citizens to make up for the shortfall created by the nearly complete elimination of wealth based taxes like estate, corporate profits and capital gain taxes.
The solution is for the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes and there will be more than enough money for mass transit and other congestion reducing alternatives. If the trust fund Mr. Moms who sat on their butts in metered spots on Parking Day (a workday) paid their fair share of taxes and had to get a job as a result, we wouldn't even be discussing this.
Unfortunately, Billionaire Mike completely empathizes with their dilemma to the point that he allows them to dictate transportation policy in this city.
in general agreement with comment #26:
what is often ommitted from discussions like this is that congestion etc already has a cost: it costs TIME.
proposals like congestion pricing and more expensive on street parking change a cost in time into a cost in money. while their proponets assert this is assigning a cost to a free resource, in fact what they really do is change the currency in which an existing cost is paid. the status quo favors those with more time than money. congestion pricing etc favors those with more money than time.
(presumably mayor bloomberg has more money than time and he favors a proposal that favors folks like himself).
the objective of asigning a cost to a free resource is to change behavior by making that resource more expenisive than an alternative resource or by bringing alternative resources to market. if there are obstacles to development or use of the alternatives adding cost or changing the currency in which the cost is paid are unlikely to help unless those obstacles are eliminated or circumvented.
further musing on my post above (#27):
it may have been a mistake to confate the proposed increased parking fees with congestion priceing. underlying principles are similar, but outcomes could be significantly different.
if the effect of the increased street parking fees is to encourage those who can afford it to use commercial off-street parking and leave street parking for those who cannot, it could actually work out rather well.
next questions are whether there are enough commercial parking structures to accomidate major growth in garage use, whether the market is likely to provide more garages without incentives, and whether incentives to build cheap off-street parking might work just as well without the increased fees for street parking.
the questions in involve the availability of alternatives (existing or new), whether the fees encourage people to use them, and who tends to get displaced.
That chip on the shoulder of Patrick [26] seems to be interfering with his reasoning powers.
"The solution is for the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes and there will be more than enough money for mass transit and other congestion reducing alternatives."
So if I get you right, the rich should pay more taxes so that mass transit will be better. Better for whom? I can only imagine, for the non-rich. So poor Patrick will still not be driving, he'll be in the subway. Except he probably won't, since as long as he can park for free he'll likely still be driving. After all, why should the rich be the only ones to have a car?
having let this idea sink in for a while i keeping liking it more all the time. while i doubt that a solution can be yanked from LA and plugged into NYC unchanged, a suitable adaptation might be quite helpful and possibly more equitable than congestion pricing.
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