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Could New York City Eliminate Free Street Parking?

Car culture has already been changed by bike and bus lanes. A transportation panel in Manhattan has floated the idea of eliminating free street parking entirely.

Bikes, double parking and black cars in the streets in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan in 2017.Credit...Edu Bayer for The New York Times

For drivers, finding a parking spot in New York City is already hard enough. There are so many regulations. So many hydrants. So many loading zones. And so few empty spaces.

Now a local transportation committee in Manhattan has broached the unthinkable: eliminating free street parking altogether.

Traffic in the committee’s 50-block stretch of the Upper West Side is “terrible” and sure to get worse, said Howard Yaruss, the chairman of the committee, which is part of the local community board.

The city has ultimate authority over parking, but the move touched off an angry debate and is a provocative example of how curb space is becoming a fierce battleground in a fight for room on New York’s crowded streets.

In the past 10 years, the city has installed dozens of miles of bus and bicycle lanes on major streets, taking away thousands of parking spaces in the process. Last month, the city did something even more radical, banning cars from 14th Street, a major thoroughfare across Manhattan.

And next year, New York will start charging drivers entering Manhattan’s most congested zones in an effort to get more cars off the roads.

The City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, says it is time to “reorient and reprioritize how we use shared street space.” Last month he pushed a $1.7 billion plan through the Council to significantly expand bike lanes.

“Cars can’t continue to be solely king of the road and the only thing we think about when we design streets,” Mr. Johnson, a Democrat who is expected to run for mayor in 2021, said in an interview.

But many car owners say they feel unfairly targeted, arguing that there are valid reasons for driving, including physical limitations that make it difficult to use trains or buses and jobs that are not easily reached by public transit.

“There’s insanity going on,” said Milton Ingerman, a retired physician who parks on the street on the Upper West Side.

“There are fewer parking spaces now than there have ever been,” he said. “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.”

Even with the expansion of bus and bike lanes, New York still has roughly three million on-street parking spaces, by some estimates — almost one for every three people.

More than 95 percent are free, and some transportation advocates say that amounts to an unjustified subsidy of car culture.

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A transportation committee on the Upper West Side of Manhattan passed a resolution calling on the city to “consider more productive and equitable uses of curbside space.” Credit...Mariana Vincenti for The New York Times

“Manhattan real estate costs on average $1,773 per square foot, and yet we are giving away 180 square feet of prime city space, almost a studio apartment, with every free parking space,” said Heather Thompson, the chief executive of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, a nonprofit advocacy group.

On the Upper West Side, the transportation committee passed a resolution saying the city should “consider more productive and equitable uses of curbside space,” including residential parking permits and parking meters “capable of surge pricing.”

The city began squeezing space for cars when Michael R. Bloomberg was mayor, building bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, including in Times Square. The Citi Bike bicycle-sharing service wiped out more parking spaces when it began in 2013 with 332 stations on the streets. It now has nearly 800 stations.

Still more spaces will be eliminated under Mr. Johnson’s plan, which calls for creating 250 miles of protected bike lanes and 150 miles of protected bus lanes over five years. The city has taken away more than 6,000 parking spaces since January 2018, according to a tabulation done by the Transportation Department for The New York Post.

“New York City’s streets have never been more fiercely contested, with growing competition among cars, buses, bikes, for-hire vehicles and trucks making hundreds of millions of annual deliveries,” said Polly Trottenberg, the city’s transportation commissioner. “However, we find that D.O.T. projects that improve transportation access, safety and environmental quality will often turn our toughest critics into converts.”

“That is," she added, “skeptics find that the sky never really falls.”

But even as the number of parking spaces has shrunk, the numbers of cars has risen. More than 1.9 million cars were registered in New York City in 2017, the most recent year for which figures were available, an increase of about 200,000 since 2011.

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One lane for construction and one lane for parking left only one narrow lane for traffic at W. 87th Street and Broadway.Credit...Mariana Vincenti for The New York Times

Many cities across the country and the world are also facing the challenges of managing street parking. Seattle has introduced color-coded “flex zones” that allow different uses of the lane closest to the curb, like passenger loading, short-term parking, bus-waiting zones and longer-term parking. Paris has steadily reduced public parking, getting rid of thousands of spaces on streets since the early 2000s.

New York’s modern parking history dates to 1950, when the city’s alternate-side two-step began.

The Sanitation Department wanted to use mechanical street sweepers, but the curbs were regularly blocked by cars.

The solution, the brainchild of a longtime Sanitation Department official, was for parked cars to be moved every other day, or every few days.

At the same time, the city, for the first time, permitted parking on streets overnight.

The city also considered, and rejected, a $60-a-month fee for overnight parking on the streets (equivalent to about $640 now).

Samuel I. Schwartz, who was the city’s traffic commissioner in the 1980s, said allowing on-street parking was “a big mistake.”

“That just allowed for the growth of vehicles in neighborhoods that couldn’t really support it,” he said.

Besides congestion, the hunt for parking spaces also contributes to air pollution. Emissions from transportation, the majority from passenger vehicles, are the single largest source of greenhouses gases, and the New York region is the country’s biggest contributor of driving-related carbon dioxide emissions.

A 2008 study of the Upper West Side found that drivers cruise an average of seven blocks, or more than a third of a mile, before they find an empty space. In one 15-block area, drivers logged a total of 366,000 miles a year looking for spaces.

New York is the only major city in the country that does not have some form of residential parking permits, which are meant to let people with cars park near where they live and keep outsiders out, said Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has long promoted pricing as a way for cities to manage parking demand.

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Since January 2018, the city has taken away more than 6,000 parking spaces, as it adds more bike and bus lanes.Credit...Mariana Vincenti for The New York Times

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.

“When you have a curbside parking scenario, you’re privileging the people who have cars over the pedestrians,” said James Sanders, a Manhattan architect and author who has studied parking patterns in cities. “On the basis of the primary idea of equity of space, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to give this space over. On the other hand, people have had it for coming on 70 years, like a right.”

As far as parking goes, a big question mark is New York’s congestion pricing plan. Beginning in 2021, New York will be the first American city to charge drivers entering Manhattan’s commercial districts.

People in neighborhoods near the boundaries worry that a surge of cars will circle their streets, hunting for free parking to avoid the congestion pricing tolls. Councilman Mark D. Levine, a Democrat who represents Upper Manhattan, has proposed a residential plan to deal with “suburban commuters dumping their cars in our neighborhoods.”

City officials say 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.

Mr. Yaruss, the transportation committee chairman, described watching an ambulance with lights flashing get stuck behind a double-parked car next to his apartment building.

Like Mr. Levine, Mr. Yaruss’s committee was concerned that congestion pricing would bring an influx of drivers looking for parking places. In May, it passed a resolution calling for the city to “discontinue” free parking on the street.

But the committee recently softened its resolution, instead calling on the city to “assess and analyze” its street parking policy.

Still, some drivers said the committee’s approach reflected a broader campaign to malign people who use cars.

“I see a very clear anti-car agenda,” said Tag Gross, who parks on the street on the Upper West Side and mostly uses the car on weekends. He bicycles to work most days, he said.

“The people who live here are not causing the traffic issue,” he said. “We’re not driving our cars to Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s to shop.’’

I’ll park my car in a garage,’’ he added. “There are people who were living in this neighborhood when it was crack infested and who use their cars for work and are now being forced out because they can’t afford another expense like a $500-a-month garage.”

But Ms. Thompson of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy said many cities that had adopted policies to discourage the use of cars had found that “people move to public transportation.’’

“Ideally, the entire city of New York would ban on-street parking or at least limit it,’’ Ms. Thompson added, “and price the parking that’s left over.’’

James Barron is a Metro reporter and columnist. He is the author of the books “Piano: The Making of a Steinway Concert Grand” and “The One-Cent Magenta” and the editor of “The New York Times Book of New York.” More about James Barron

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Thinking the Unthinkable: Don’t Even Think of Parking Here. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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