Is This The Beginning Of The End For Free Parking In NYC?

New York City has about 3 million parking spaces, the majority of those cost drivers no money. But that could soon change. City officials are starting to recognize the costs and losses of giving away free curb space.

Speaking at a community board panel on residential parking permits on the Upper West Side Tuesday night, the Department Of Transportation’s Manhattan Borough Commissioner, Ed Pincar, predicted the focus of the DOT for the next decade.

“If the last 10 years was focused on trying to develop a series of tools for safer streets, I think curb management is going to be the theme for the next 10 years,” Pincar said at Tuesday’s CB7 meeting. “Particularly as technology improves, it would be great if there were different spots on a block that are charged different amounts and maybe have different times.”

And if you ask an economist, they’ll point out free street parking has never really been free.

"We are imposing time costs, crash risk costs, noise costs, pollution costs and frustration costs and delivery costs as well, on ourselves, or neighbors, and our community,” economist and transportation advocate Charles Komanoff said at the same Community Board meeting Tuesday night.

Komanoff was invited because CB7 is beginning the early stages of broaching the topic of residential street parking permits.

New York City is the only major American city that doesn’t have a residential street parking permit system. Parking has been free since 1950. (Before the meeting, Gale Brewer tried to jump start the conversation with a report on how permit systems work in seven cities around the world.)

With congestion pricing coming next year, a citywide parking permit system doesn’t seem so far-fetched, though the city says it will still need the state’s approval.

“The city does not have the authority on its own to implement a residential parking system, we would need Albany to pass that law,” Pincar with DOT said. “I do think that our state legislators are going to have great say over what a system looks like. Ultimately our political officials are going to make that determination.”

An early show of hands at that CB 7 meeting revealed that the majority of the hundred or so residents there were car owners. And while many expressed an interest in some sort of permit system, many also said they’d only buy into it if it would entitle them to an actual parking spot.

“We wouldn’t be able to guarantee any resident who paid a fee for a parking permit an actual space, and that’s a real question that the larger community and our elected officials and all of us would have to consider,” Pincar added. (For instance, drivers in Washington D.C. wishing to park on the street longer than two hours need a residential parking permit, which requires you to register your car for $35 annually, though their city council recently debated raising the fee to $50.)

While those technical problems will need to be solved, the other pressing question is how much the city should charge: enough that some drivers who don’t need a car could be persuaded to give up their vehicle, but not too much that the scheme becomes ineffective.

Komanoff, whose extensive spreadsheet was used to calculate the possible congestion pricing fees, figures one 18-foot parking spot in Manhattan's Central Business District is worth $3,000 a month, while other spaces in less demand would command lower prices.

Another parking expert, UCLA Professor Donald Shoup, used local parking garage prices to come up with different figures. He wrote to Gothamist/ WNYC that he estimates a Manhattan parking spot is worth $400 to $600 a month, Brooklyn is $175 to $300, and Queens about $200 a month. He says his parking permit system would net $3 billion in annual revenue. (The DOT counted $414 million in revenue this past fiscal year.)

Shoup recommends cities charge market rates for curb parking and spend it on public services. “The way to get the right uses of the curb is to charge the right prices for using the curb,” Shoup said.

“The public benefits paid for by parking revenue can motivate the vast majority to support a proposal to charge for curb parking to finance better public services on their block,” he wrote.

Listen to Stephen Nessen's radio report here:

“Competition for the curb is heating up, and many of the competitors can produce high value for the city: bus stops, bus lanes, bike stations, bike lanes, loading zones for package deliveries, loading zones for TNCs, cafes, parks, and many other uses that can be much more valuable to the city than using the space to store empty cars for free.”

The city does charge for some parking, there are about 85,000 muni meters, according to NYC Open Data. NYCHA charges between $1,000 to $2,600 for a parking spot in one of their lots too.

But the city loses out in other ways. State law says the city can only charge companies that use the roadway for construction $50 a month, a ludicrously low fee for creating tens of thousands of dollars in congestion. In 2017, the latest figures we could get from the DOT, there were 250,000 permits issued to block part of a roadway. The city earned just $10.6 million for these, with fees waived for government agencies.

In New York City, there are 2,186,273 registered vehicles, according to the latest DMV statistics, although the numbers don’t take into account that some New Yorkers may register their cars at other homes outside the city. Comparing registered personal vehicles (not taxis) to Census data, shows that 13 percent of Manhattan residents own cars; as do 32 percent of Queens residents, 56 percent of Staten Island residents, 18 percent of Brooklyn residents and 17 percent of Bronx residents.

The DOT estimates about half of the city’s car owners rely on curb parking.Meanwhile, average bus speeds are at their lowest—7.58 mph—in decades, according to the DOTs latest mobility report. Cycling rates are up, with more than 800,000 New Yorkers reporting they bike regularly. And with City Council Speaker Corey Johnson’s Streets Master Plan passing by a wide margin this week, it’s clear the public, and some officials are ready to rethink how our city streets are organized.

But parking has been the third rail of local politics. Just pop into any community board meeting on the topic.

“If you want residential parking,what should the price be? Free, round it off, zero. That way the residents can park their cars,” Eliot Weinstein, 64, said, angrily, at Tuesday’s CB7 meeting. “You want to take the spots away, and the Citibikes, and all the other crap, I see whole rows of streets and they’re Citibikes.”

When asked if Weinstein would support a plan for residential parking permits he told Gothamist/ WNYC, “I’m against punishing people who own cars and making life so difficult.”

But Zhan Guo, an associate professor at New York University, said his research has found with Uber and Lyft, and other car sharing options, demand for parking has gone down in recent years.

“All these new developments in the transportation market I think the parking has been slightly declined in the past several years,” he said.

For the general public to accept the idea that street parking and curb use should be charged at a rate, will take a major cultural shift. Transit advocate and founder of the bike pod start-up Oonnee Shabazz Stuart said that will take more time.

"Our entire system favors the personal vehicle. And it's not like people at DOT or city hall or the NYPD think about this consciously, but this is the world we were all raised in,” he said. “We were all raised in the city where cars dominate our streets its seems normal to us.”