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.
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.
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.
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-...
[0] https://www.transalt.org/sites/default/files/news/reports/20...
This might be "Wet roads cause rain"
The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup
https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking-Updated/dp/193...
If half the street weren’t off limits due to parked cars, traffic could easily route around such disruptions.
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.)
https://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-...
Not that I'm advocating free parking. I'm not. But this isn't a good argument against it.
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.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/07/05/new-york-is-really-aw...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
