Roughly 97% of parking spaces in NYC are free.

Whynot, #2 above is from a hub-centric perspective.

This fails to account for so much of the city where there's only one erratic local line or measly bus going in only two opposite directions, and amenities, work etc. are farther apart in *all* directions.

The articles wrongly use the vast majority of city streets that serve these areas in their misleading calculations.

But we agree that this should just be more of an issue to be resolved in the small, densely-populated hub areas near Manhattan, not the whole rest of the city as included for outrage effect in these articles' stats.

WhyFi said:

Okay, you're an engineer - do you think that X should be designed to accommodate the current use or that X should be designed to encourage the most efficient use?

I think it's a mix of the two. No matter how you slice it though, due to low population involvement and low utilization rates, bikes are not a big people mover in NYC. Plus there's not much convertibility- i.e., if you have a family of four with a car and essentially price them out of owning it, they're not all gonna go buy bikes. They're gonna use public transportation. So if the initiative is to have less cars on the road, then PT has to be strengthened to accommodate people leaving their cars.

whynot_31 said:

2. I imagine that very few people NEED a car. In addition to the subway and bus system, Car services, Access a ride, etc are available. The use of these resources is often much cheaper than car ownership, so I can't see this as having an effect on the poor. However, there are people who genuinely NEED their cars and who would not be adequately served by these systems. I establish a procedure to exempt them from the usage fees

You would be surprised. Back when I was commuting from BK to the BX, my car cost me about $600 or so a month after insurance and gas. It took about 30 mins to get there in the morning and about an hr to get home. PT would be about an hour and a half, including about a half a mile to mile long walk (depending on the route), plus since part of the commute was on a bus, during rush hour who knows. Cab fare there is about $40 each way or $1800/mo. Car wasn't the only way but it was the easiest.

3. I dislike bikers who feel the law does not apply to them. I'd be ok with taking all of the fees from on street parking, and putting it toward traffic enforcement. ....let's even target bikers.

I don't think it's fair to "target" anybody, but bikers have had carte blanche for some time now. If we want the resources we have to play by the rules. Me personally, I could care less about a fancy bike lane. Just give me something and let me be.

4. How does reducing the number of spaces available to for cars to park inhibit travel? By establishing loading zones, it seems as if there would always be a space to park and less double parking.

If you don't have a place to park your car, you can't own one. On a residential street, a loading zone isn't something that should take priority... the UPS dude is in and out in 5 mins, I think double parking can be excused in that instance.

....yes, BRT is the way to go. One of the first ways to make BRT feasible is to get rid of a lot of the on street parking, and/or have it subsidized by those who drive cars.

I agree, but again, only where it is needed. Bergen St does not need a BRT lane, it needs more frequent bus service.

Remember, implementing a fee (or restriction) causes people to use a resource less. In this case we are going to implement a fee (or restriction) on on-street parking. Such actions will make bus transit faster due to less cars on the road.

This is true, but again, most major throughfares where buses are a must already have pay for play parking. I think most, if not all parking on Nostrand Ave is metered, and yet people still park on it all day. In such instances the best solution is probably just to ban parking completely w/a dedicated bus lane

Boygabriel said:

Can you specifically explain to me the offensive invective in these articles?

Just to clarify any misinterpretation, there was no mention of offensive invective.

What I mentioned was that the invective approach of the articles framed the discussion as an outrage and apparent injustice on a massive scale to provoke and provide more justification for the site's sympathetic audience.

There was no mention of the articles themselves as being offensive. Crafted as an outrage (injustice, not anger) to mobilize that audience, yes. The articles themselves as offensive, no.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2011/03/22/new-york-has-81875-metered-parking-spaces-and-millions-of-free-ones/

Well, the url, for starters. Then the premise: millions of free parking in otherwise available public space. Boosted by stats misleadingly inflated (massively deflating the % paid, to be specific) on a logarithmic scale to include millions of free spaces among *all* streets in NYC.

Worded and posted on a particular site audience strongly skewed to the cause where one could count on it provoking outrage and being spread like wildfire among the choir that would not reasonably question or doubt the veracity of any of the above, so long as there were some apparent stats provided to support it.

And deliberate avoidance of the (at least) 60-year normal reality across the US and other first-world countries that parking on roads and streets is generally what is done.

Strangely, that is portrayed here as some outrageous conspiracy to subsidize more cars to the ultimate sole benefit of car owners.

They might as well have additionally inflated their numbers for further clutch-pearls outrage effect to state that, of the 4 million miles of streets and roads in the US, free parking accounts for more than 99.999% of that.

I could go on, but those are the main glaring ones for just the first article cited.

And the following, re-quoting the original post that set the context here, is one possible example of the resulting, relayed call-to-arms re-posting and commentary that are often the (intended) effects meant to radiate outward from such skewed articles:

(please, nothing personal intended...everyone's done similar for causes dear to them, including me

Roughly 97% of parking spaces in NYC are free.

That's miles of public space, given away for free, so that people can park their own personal cars FOR FREE.

It's a terrible use of public space. It gives way too much priority to car ownership. And it renders arguments about bike lanes and parking spaces completely moot.

The following echo some forms of similar themes mentioned above about the initial article, in a call-to-arms sense:

http://www.streetsblog.org/2011/02/25/nyc-asks-banks-for-ideas-on-parking-privatization/

http://www.streetsblog.org/2008/10/15/study-city-residential-parking-requirements-lead-to-more-driving/

Boygabriel said:Public on-street private car parking is indeed devoting space for free to something that benefits only one person or one family at a time. I'm not sure how this is a disputable observation in any way.

So, what percentage of the population drives a car?

+ Plus +

How many commercial vehicles are there on a regular basis?

Something tells me (and CTK provided stats to this effect) the total number of just those is on a whole order of magnitude higher than the small percent of the population that would regularly use same space for only some of the day.

I'm not sure that's disputable in any way.

+1 whynot

Boygabriel said:

It's not a question of playing nice.

It's being realistic about the ongoing discussion in this city and community.

Bikers are not a uniformly or even majority angry lot when it comes to negotiation of public policy (everyone's angry when they get a ticket of course).

This is a false perception based on unhelpful generalizations and it is endemic to many bike lane discussions.

Well, cyclist generalizations aside (never mind the fact that I know a lot of cyclists), I don't think it's unreasonable to point out the inherent contradiction in broadly deriding the use of public space for private parking, but then in the same breath championing the use of the same public space for such a limited and underutilizing purpose as bike lanes. We might as well turn parking spaces into public parks, because in the context of NYer's needs & the city's endless traffic and transit problems bike lanes are about as a useful use of road. And in my experience, bikers feel entitled to such a grossly disproportionate dedication of resources and public space to their cause w/o looking at the bigger picture, which only adds to the problem. Admittedly though this may only be the case for the hundreds or so of cyclists I've met in my life so I could be wrong.

We can wax poetic about the theoretical and philosophical purposes of public space... and to a large degree I agree with you, I would hate for public parks to be razed for more condos or w/e. But the idea that even half the parking spaces in NYC are being misused is false. Many NYCers need cars to make a living, much of the parking space that should be blocked off from parking is, etc etc

I hereby propose that we reduce the on street parking in the "dense" commercial and residential areas by 30%, and we then assign a fee to the remaining spaces in the dense areas.

Using no maps, I believe that this would leave 93% of the parking places in the city as "free".

Note: nothing is actually free. My use of the term free in this contexts merely connotes an equal balance of the benefits from allowing the spot to be used by a private automobile relative to its other potential uses. While you were not looking, I conducted a Kant inspired Utilitarian analysis.

Note #2: I assume that the city will spend an equal amount collecting the fee as the fee itself, therefore the action has no effect on the city's, or MTA's budget.

whynot_31 said:

I hereby propose that we reduce the on street parking in the "dense" commercial and residential areas by 30%, and we then assign a fee to the remaining spaces in the dense areas.

One need look no further than to Brooklyn Heights to see this in action. Parking on one side of the street only on minor side streets, except for street sweeping days.

As much of a pain as that makes it to find parking, those streets are much less congested, feel wider and are easier on pedestrians and folks on bikes.

And oh, the parking ticket revenues they must collect.

...

Note #2: I assume that the city will spend an equal amount collecting the fee as the fee itself, therefore the action has no effect on the city's, or MTA's budget.

Equal? Not more?

anecdotal experience-

If it is good enough for the rich of Brooklyn Heights, it is good enough for many of us poor schlubs.

Boygabriel said:

I don't think it's unreasonable to point out the inherent contradiction in broadly deriding the use of public space for private parking, but then in the same breath championing the use of the same public space for such a limited and underutilizing purpose as bike lanes.

I understand the contradiction you're trying to point out, but it falls apart when you attempt to equate bike lanes to public space devoted to single-private-car parking.

That's another framed, deliberately skewed comparison put forth as unquestionable by one side in spite of contradicting itself.

A balanced comparison?

Let's do the math. How many cars parked on the streets for two days at a time?

roughly 50 per side, so 100 on an average block

x # blocks, say just 10 to be minimal

=========================

= 1000 cars in just 10 blocks

How many bikes traverse those same streets during those two days? Not counted multiply, just once. Cars were limited here as counted just once during any given parking period as occupying the space (2 days) so you must apply the same criteria to bikes.

Nowhere near 1000 *different* bikes counted every 10 blocks. (20 blocks = 2000 bikes etc)

That's a viable comparison. And that's wayyy more cars using the street parking than bikes.

That divide only multiplies when you account for the number of persons that benefit.

bike = 1 person

car = 1, 2, 3, 4...(single to family)

But just on parked cars alone it's not even close.

Also of note: Cars pay ~$60/yr or more for registration, and tolls to help support bridges etc. That's a lot of cars, paying a lot of annual registrations and regular tolls all year. Easily in the millions just on annual registrations, probably 100x that when regular toll fees are factored in.

For all of these claims framed in the context of the one-sided burden cars place on the city, just what have bikes contributed for upkeep of the roads and bridges they use?

Posed more as a rhetorical question along with doubt of other claims above, just to mention that there are more sides to any issue than what one side carefully positions for its own benefit.

I believe most cars are bigger than a bench, or a bikes.

I believe that a car occupies more space, more of the time than trash would once a week.

I believe that more people would use a loading zone during the course of a day, than if a car was parked in the same spot.

simple solution already being enacted: kill the bikers with our cars