City Council Speaker Corey Johnson may have just slammed the parking brake on his mayoral bid.
Johnson fumed to WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show” on Thursday that too much public space is dedicated to on-street car storage, potentially alienating a host of car-driving voters.
“I do think that there are too many parking spaces in New York City,” Johnson said bluntly. “We have over 3 million [on-street] parking spaces in New York City … and we should reclaim that space and use it for the public.”
Johnson, an early front-runner in the 2021 mayoral race, was responding to a call from “Christopher from the East Village,” who was venting about lack of parking in his neighborhood.
“They have completely decimated all street parking,” said Christopher, who works in the film industry and uses his car for work. “We are residents of the neighborhood. We have been living here over 25 years, and we count on our cars to get us to and from gigs with costumes and bags and people, and you know, all sorts of headpieces. It is a really difficult thing to have to deal with.”
Johnson said he sympathized with Christopher, but presented an alternate side to the parking argument.
“We need to break the car culture. It is choking our streets. It is literally killing people,” he said. “And that means we need to prioritize pedestrians and cyclists and mass transit over private automobile use.”
Johnson earlier this year proposed a five-year plan aimed at getting people out of their cars, including legislation that would require the city to build 150 miles of dedicated bus lanes and 250 mile of protected bike lanes.
When asked by host Lehrer if he planned to use his clout to allocate “a lot more money” in next year’s city budget toward building protected bike lanes, Johnson said he’s all in.
“The answer is ‘yes,’ because you can’t put a price on people’s lives,” he said. “This is really, really, really dangerous in New York City, and we have too many cars and trucks on the street.
“People are taking their lives into their own hands in cycling and in just walking around the city. Cars are lethal vehicles if they’re not driven safely and properly, and so we need protected bike lanes.”
So far this year, 15 cyclists have been killed by cars — double the number killed by this time last year, according to city data.