Graphic: New York Times/Chicago News Cooperative.

Streetsblog has been following the Chicago parking privatization closely because it is the poster child for all that can go wrong with Public Private Partnerships, or PPPs. The basic idea behind a PPP is that the government leases public transportation infrastructure -- say a bridge, highway, airport, or parking meters -- that can generate user fees. In exchange for the fees, a private investor pays the government a large upfront fee or assumes the cost of improving the infrastructure. PPPs are popular in Europe, especially at airports.

Sustainable transportation advocates should care about PPPs for a number of reasons. First, politicians and bureaucrats are captivated by the fantasy that PPPs are the ultimate free lunch, generating billions in transportation investment at no cost to the taxpayer. President Obama's euphemism for PPPs is "creative financing." Here in New York, state officials have repeatedly presented a PPP as the way to raise billions for the astronomical cost of replacing the Tappan Zee Bridge. This is dangerous thinking. PPPs do inflict a cost, and it's a big one. Huge amounts of revenue that could be directed to public transit, or crucial road and bridge repair, are instead going to Wall Street.

The second concern is that PPPs allow public officials to skew the public planning and review process and put private profit before public benefit. A private investor has tremendous leverage over what gets built if they are the government's main financing option. The investor's goal is to make money, not to produce the greatest public benefit over many decades.

Despite the latest revelation, Chicago is only beginning to recognize the inherent problems with privatizations. According to the Times, Alderman Scott Waguespack introduced a measure that would require an "independent third-party valuation" of major asset lease proposals before any future privatization deal is completed. The legislation would require "a comparison of public retention and private leasing over the life cycle of the agreement." This could serve as an important safeguard, but so far, the measure only has 12 co-sponsors among the council's 49 other members.

When will pedestrians and cyclists be able to feel safe and secure on New York City streets? Photo: Bryan Goebel.

In a recent interview with Streetsblog, Tompkins evokes "Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs," a traditional marketing and psychology concept, to explain why ensuring public safety was the crucial first step in the renaissance of Times Square, and a pre-requisite for reclaiming sections of Broadway for pedestrians and public space.

You need to take care of the basics of comfort and security first before you can even think about anything else. That played out with respect to nature and parks, but wasn't really playing out in the streets and sidewalks. I think not only in Times Square and in New York City, but in a bunch of places... we've been paying attention to that. And that's been the paradigm shift that's driving a lot of this.

Tompkins' assessment has important implications for the movement to tame the streets. If establishing basic security is a fundamental prerequisite for widespread public use of any space, what about creating order and safety on our streets?

Crime and the perception of disorder have plummeted in public spaces like parks, squares, and sidewalks. But it is abundantly clear to anyone who bicycles, walks or drives in New York City that this isn’t true in the streets. Speeding and dangerous driving are epidemic. This perception is backed by study after study and by the reality that thousands of cyclists and pedestrians are struck every year. The dangerous chaos on the streets also means very few children or older people feel comfortable bicycling, and only a small portion of people who consider cycling actually ride regularly.

It will take decades before the Department of Transportation can re-engineer most of the city's big streets for cyclists and pedestrians. Even then, laws must be enforced. New York City has changed the equation in parks and on the sidewalks. What about the streets?

-- MTA Chairman Jay Walder, quoted in the New York Times.

These are heartening words for transit advocates. Incoming MTA Chairman Jay Walder clearly wants to make big improvements to the agency's 250 bus routes. But given his time, budget and authority, there is a big gap between what he can do and what he would like to do for buses.

NYPD cruisers parked in the 34th Street bus lane. When it comes to bus route enforcement, Jay Walder has his hands full.

Let's look at the things that Walder and the MTA can realistically do for buses.

First up: contactless or “swipe less” MetroCards, like London's Oyster card, which are waved over a sensor instead of swiped. These contactless cards speed bus boarding and can save a lot of time over the course of a day. They also help reduce bus bunching by making loading times more consistent on every bus. Contactless cards are a mature technology which the MTA has already funded, and which Walder helped pioneer in London. So, there is every reason to think he can hurry its implementation.

Walder can also help with the long-delayed GPS bus locator system and real-time arrival information for passengers. These are also mature technologies which bus systems around the world use to reduce bunching, troubleshoot delays, and keep riders informed. To date, the MTA has bungled GPS tracking, and insisted on trying to solve the canyon effect caused by Manhattan skyscrapers instead of deploying GPS and passenger information on the huge majority of routes that don't go through Midtown, or even enter Manhattan. This is a highly visible and affordable improvement that Walder would get a lot of credit for.

Fortunately for Walder, when it comes to bus improvements, he has a strong ally in the NYCDOT and the mayor, who are leading the effort to institute Select Bus Service. SBS routes include elements of Bus Rapid Transit, including pre-paid boarding, transit signal priority, and painted bus lanes. Planning for SBS is well-advanced, though the initiative has very modest funding by MTA standards. Currently, DOT and the MTA intend to roll out one or two new SBS lines a year. Walder may be able to accelerate SBS through additional planning and funding, and by making the case for more physically protected bus lanes like the one planned for 34th Street in Midtown.

During Walder's tenure at Transport for London, the agency employed express bus lanes and other BRT features to great effect. So Walder is keenly aware of the need to "prioritize" buses on the street. In his interview with the Times, Walder emphasized the compelling reasons to enforce bus lanes and bus stops more vigorously. Bus riders, advocates and transit experts all agree on the desirability of better enforcement. The need is obvious. But increasing enforcement enough to make a difference in bus service will probably be the most difficult thing for Walder to achieve.

In London, more than 1,000 automated enforcement cameras mounted on buses -- and another 50 or so on utility poles -- help keep bus lanes and bus stops clear of other vehicles. Violations caught by these cameras result in steep fines. Unfortunately, in New York City, enforcement cameras and increased fines for lane blockers require the approval of the state legislature.

In 2008, NYCDOT made bus enforcement cameras its highest legislative priority. But the legislature has a long history of resisting enforcement cameras of all types. It took from 1993 to 2009 for the city to win an increase from 50 to 150 red light enforcement cameras. The MTA and transit advocates first started asking for bus enforcement cameras in the 1990s. Without cameras, enforcing bus lanes and stops is very difficult. You can do it on small numbers of specific corridors, like Fordham Road, but overall, it is extremely hard to keep the thousands of bus stops and hundreds of miles of lanes clear using only police and traffic agents. Which is why most modern BRT systems use enforcement cameras or physically separated rights-of-way. Whether Albany will grant legislative approval in the next year for enough cameras to make a visible impact -- or even any cameras at all -- is a question mark.

The specific approaches Walder pursues to improve bus service will probably meet with different degrees of success. But overall, his interest in better buses will give a big boost to efforts to dedicate more street space to transit and surely result in better service.

This is the second of two posts exploring how incoming MTA Chairman Jay Walder can improve New York City's bus system. Read the first part here.

-- Jay Walder, MTA chairman, as quoted in the New York Times

Improvements like real-time arrival displays led bus ridership to grow significantly during Jay Walder's tenure at Transport for London. Photo: King Huang Chung/Flickr.

While it may seem obvious that the chair of the MTA should devote considerable energy to buses, this is rarely the case. The head of the MTA is typically consumed by planning, funding, and managing mega-projects and the capital plan. Historically, the MTA has been heavily oriented toward subways and commuter rail. On the average weekday, the agency's subways carry 5.2 million trips and its buses 2.4 million.

But these are not normal times at the MTA. Walder has one year to make a big impression. After that he will almost certainly have a new boss as governor, who will have two options: fire Walder or rehire him. Bus improvements can be done relatively quickly and cheaply, and by reducing delays can actually save money while resulting in better service and higher ridership.

Buses are also attractive to Walder because the mayor and DOT are already aggressively pushing bus corridor improvements. DOT and the MTA have launched a successful Select Bus Service route on Fordham Road in the Bronx, with new routes planned and funded for First and Second Avenues in 2010. The mayor is a good friend to have. He controls streets, parking enforcement and seats on the MTA board.

But Select Bus Service only helps a handful of the MTA's 250 bus routes. Also needed are system-wide improvements. Walder has identified three of these as priorities.

First is a swipe-free or "contactless" MetroCard like London's Oyster Card, which is waved over a sensor on buses and subways. This would reduce boarding times.

Second is GPS-based, real-time information for riders waiting at bus stops. This would reduce uncertainty over travel times and help reduce bunching. The MTA has struggled with GPS location for years, while similar technology has been adopted by transit systems around the world and in New York City taxis.

Third, but most emphasized by Walder, is improved enforcement of bus stops and lanes, especially with automated enforcement cameras. Enforcement cameras are in widespread use in London. But here, they will require approval by the state legislature. Given that the legislature is struggling with profound internal dysfunction, massive state budget deficits, and a collapsing MTA capital plan, it will likely be a tough lift for bus lane cameras to win approval. It took DOT decades of effort to win its relatively small number of red light cameras.

Regardless of the exact improvements he undertakes, there is a powerful logic steering Jay Walder toward bus improvements. And that is good news for long-suffering bus riders.

Photo: Best Recession Ever

All in all, it wasn't the money for nothing bargain the City Council seemed to think it was back in December when Morgan Stanley handed over a check for $1.157 billion. This manna from Wall Street plugged the city's gaping budget hole and allowed the council to avoid painful tax hikes and service cuts. It also enticed lawmakers in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, where officials were considering their own parking privatization deals.

In return for the upfront cash, Chicago leased its 36,000 parking meters for the next 75 years to the Morgan-led consortium, and granted it the authority to double and triple meter rates. By 2013 downtown meters are slated to double to $6 per hour; neighborhood meter rates are to double to $2 per hour.

The deal was pushed hard by Mayor Richard Daley. The core of his privatization argument was that Chicago lacked the political will to raise meter rates and that desperate fiscal times demanded unlocking the value of public parking. He noted that city meters were only generating about $20 million a year, and because of neighborhood resistance, meter prices hadn't gone up in 20 years. His conclusion was that Chicago had to outsource the political will to raise meter rates.

However, the inspector general's report concludes that, "If Chicago were to keep control of the parking-meter system and operate it under the same terms as the private company, the system would be worth approximately $2.13 billion (in present dollars)," or $974 million more than the city received. Ironically, another cost of Chicago parking privatization was that it quashed a number of neighborhood-supported parking improvement districts, in which higher meter fees were to be invested in local pedestrian, bicycle and transit improvements.

While public-private partnerships can be appealing because they require motorists to pay more of the actual cost of driving, are these deals really the only way to overcome political resistance to higher motoring fees?

Photo: AP/Post-Standard

In politics, reputation matters. The scapegoating of the MTA has undermined the political case for transit funding and given cover to the hypocrites in Albany who blame the MTA, instead of themselves, for the agency's funding woes. Looking forward, it is critical that the MTA burnish its reputation as an effective and accountable public agency and excellent investment for public funds. There are many political forces that benefit from keeping the MTA as a scapegoat, its reputation besmirched. So, a clean bill of health for the MTA requires an unimpeachable, politically formidable force far above the gutter of the New York political fray. How about President Obama?

The president has spent enormous energy restoring public confidence in the banking system. A key part of his efforts has been the Treasury Department’s careful scrutiny of bank management and finances. Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Paterson should ask President Obama to help restore public confidence in the MTA by ordering the Federal Transit Administration to send in a team of management, finance and policy experts. The MTA receives millions in federal support and the U.S. government has a strong interest in seeing that money well spent. The FTA team would definitively and publicly assess the state of the MTA, detailing both its good and bad management practices while clarifying and vetting agency finances.

Most transit experts believe the MTA is a relatively well run public agency which compares favorably with other big American and foreign transit systems. The agency’s biggest problem is that the state and city have spent the last two decades reducing their financial support, loading the agency with debt, and making it overly dependent on volatile, cyclical funding like the mortgage recording tax. The FTA's assessment would bring these facts to the fore and lay the political groundwork for a stronger case for transit funding.

The New Jersey "trucker's special." Graphic: Sam Schwartz.

The truck inundation is due to the great counter-clockwise route that truckers take from New Jersey to Long Island and back to Jersey, to avoid paying the one-way, westbound, “double toll” on the Verrazano Bridge, or the two tolls on the George Washington Bridge and high peak hour tolls at the east bound Lincoln Tunnel. This state of affairs leaves a free path from Long Island to New Jersey across the Manhattan Bridge, over Canal Street, and out of the city via the westbound Lincoln and Holland Tunnels.

Because the trucking diversion -- the legacy of a deal cut on behalf of Staten Island Republicans -- is inherently political, the best policy options are not available. Congestion pricing would have solved the worst of the truck problem, as would restoring two-way tolls on the Verrazano Bridge, at least for trucks. But despite tough going in the State Senate, the MTA financial crisis and Silver's partial endorsement of the Ravitch Commission toll plan may offer some hope for neighborhoods battered by truck traffic, including downtown Brooklyn and western Queens.

Though no details have been released by the MTA, the Ravitch Commission or Sheldon Silver, it is very possible that truck tolls in the rescue plan will be set to match the truck tolls on other major MTA crossings. That would mean EZPass tolls of $20.25 each way for eighteen wheelers crossing the Manhattan, Williamsburg or Queensboro Bridges. (Trucks are not allowed on the Brooklyn Bridge.) This toll would greatly reduce truckers' financial incentive to cut across lower Manhattan on the way to New Jersey or further west. It's not perfect, but certainly enough to alter the time/money calculation so that some truckers will change routes. More effective, but also more politically difficult, ways to eliminate the great circle route include making the new tolls one-way for trucks westbound on the East River bridges and MTA tunnels, or following the Port Authority's lead and placing peak hour truck tolls on the new truck crossings.

General details:

• New tolls on East and Harlem River Bridges equaling "a single ride subway fare," ($2 each way.*)
  
• Management, possibly ownership, of East and Harlem River Bridges transferred to MTA from NYC DOT
• Maintenance and operation of East and Harlem River Bridges transferred to MTA from NYC DOT
• Truck tolls pro-rated on "single subway ride fare" or based on other MTA major crossings:$10 to $20.25 for 18-wheelers
  

• $450 million to MTA operating and capital budget
• $50-$100 million savings to NYC DOT in annual bridge maintenance and capital costs 

• Major reductions in truck traffic on Manhattan Bridge, where trucks now constitute 25 percent of vehicle traffic
• Major reductions  in overall traffic on Canal Street due to reductions in truck traffic
• Modest traffic reductions in Long Island City, Downtown Brooklyn, Northern Manhattan, South Bronx

Unknowns:

• Toll for taxis and for-hire vehicles
• Toll for government placard holders
• Toll for vans and smaller commercial vehicles
• Two direction tolls?* Tolls on the Midtown Tunnel and other "major MTA crossings" are two-way. We assume new bridge tolls will be applied in each direction, so a round trip car commuter will pay $4. 
• Exact status of management and operational control of East and Harlem River Bridges. To be determined by future agreement between MTA and NYC DOT: including bike/ped paths.
  

Of course, the State Senate has yet to offer up a plan of its own -- for what it's worth, the Senate has a new web site designed to gather public input on how to overcome the MTA budget shortfall -- and early indications are that some prominent Senate Dems are opposed to tolls altogether. We will know shortly if Malcolm Smith's pledge to consider tolls will result in the Senate passing Silver's modified Ravitch plan.

For more on East River tolls, traffic reductions and who pays, check out these 2003 reports from Charles Komanoff [PDF] and by Bruce Schaller for Transportation Alternatives and Straphangers Campaign [PDF].

Who rides the bus? Data source: American Public Transportation Association

The House version of President Obama's stimulus plan has left bus riders with nothing to look forward to but stiff fare hikes and painful service cuts. Bus systems got zero in immediate operating support from the bill that passed yesterday -- stunning neglect compared to the $150 billion in educational "operating assistance" to local schools and universities and $127 billion in emergency health care "operating assistance" to state Medicaid and private insurance programs. A relatively puny request for $2 billion in transit operating support was shot down before even reaching committee.

Buses carry 59 percent of American transit riders and are the core of transit service in both urban and small town settings. But according to the New York Times:

Fifty-one transit systems have recently proposed service cuts or fare increases... (which) make it harder for people to get to work (or look for work), and they will undermine one of the long-term goals of the stimulus package: laying the groundwork for a greener economy.

The burden of these transit cuts falls disproportionately on African Americans, who comprise 38 percent of all bus riders in the country, compared to 12 percent of the overall population. (There's a reason that Rosa Parks acted for her civil rights on a bus.)

Unfortunately, the Obama administration and the House of Representatives have largely forsaken bus riders. It is now up to the Senate to provide emergency transit operating help to sustain service and reduce fare hikes. Otherwise, Americans will watch billions of stimulus dollars rain down on schools and hospitals while major transit systems teeter on the edge of insolvency, green collar jobs are cut, and energy-conserving transit riders are forced into cars.

There are a number of reasons why bus riders have lost out so badly in the struggle for stimulus help. One is that they have no effective lobby in Washington. This is partly the result of conventional thinking that hasn't caught up to the current crisis. Transit agencies and advocates tend to equate "transit" with "infrastructure" or capital expenditures, so the federal government is not expected to help with operating expenses. This formulation is generally biased against buses, which are cheap to buy but relatively costly to operate.

The "transit=capital" formula also ended up hurting overall transit aid because Obama fiscal czar Larry Summers believes that transit projects take too long to get underway, and are not a good way to inject money quickly into a depressed economy. Unlike local schools, whose teachers' unions made a strong case for an unprecedented infusion of $150 billion in federal operating help, transit agencies and their supporters have kept fighting for more capital aid and have not pressed their elected officials for the emergency operating help needed to bail out the nation's floundering bus and transit systems. This must change. The same arguments for emergency help to schools apply to bus service.

Green-collar jobs are on the line in Barack Obama's adopted hometown. Photo of CTA bus driver: goatopolis/Flickr

Congress and purported urbanist Barack Obama are fiddling with a 1950s-era stimulus package while America's transit systems burn. You name the city, and its transit system is falling off a financial cliff.  In Denver, Minneapolis, New York, and dozens of other large and small cities, revenue is plunging from the sales and real estate taxes that transit depends on. So despite big increases in transit ridership, many transit providers are cutting service and even laying off drivers. Yet not one cent from the $825 billion stimulus package would protect America's bus and subway riders from massive service cuts and fare hikes.

To transit riders, environmentalists and anyone concerned with social justice, the stimulus package is political cognitive dissonance on an epic scale. The vast majority of the nation's transit riders are low-income bus passengers, many of them African Americans in center cities -- the constituents that Obama ministered to as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side. Yet the proposed stimulus plan not only shortchanges public transit overall, it provides zero aid for day-to-day operations.

The stimulus is supposed to create jobs quickly. It calls for funding "shovel ready" projects, a standard that tends to discriminate against transit projects, and is absurd on its face. Transit operating funds can be spent quickly and easily, but it will take years to spend the billions in capital projects proposed in the latest version of the stimulus package:

• $30 billion for highways
• $31 billion to modernize federal and other public infrastructure for energy efficiency
• $19 billion for clean water, flood control and environmental restoration
• $9 billion for transit

It will take time for the economy and local government to digest and contract out billions in infrastructure spending. In contrast, local transit agencies can spend billions in stimulus aid quickly just by keeping existing bus and subway service operating. If the true intent of the stimulus is to inject money into the economy as quickly and efficiently as possible, and do so in an environmentally friendly and socially just manner, then transit operating assistance is an obvious choice.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune summed it up nicely in a recent editorial that quotes local transportation official Peter Bell: "I'm not sure how much sense it makes hiring a construction worker at the same time you're laying off a bus driver."

Under the agreement with Morgan Stanley Infrastructure, meter rates will rise substantially and some meters will operate overnight and on Sundays. Chicago currently nets $20 million a year from its meters, and revenue should triple or quadruple given planned meter rates. The deal is by far the largest of its kind in the US and continues Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's privatization of city transportation infrastructure, including Midway Airport and the elevated Chicago Skyway.

The agreement is interesting from a transportation reform perspective because the higher meter rates, applied through modern meters, will help sharply reduce double-parking and cruising traffic. This means less air pollution, less time wasted in traffic, and more potential street space for sidewalk extensions, bikes and buses. 

Despite these benefits, Chicago's privatized road to parking reform has serious flaws. The concession will cost future taxpayers several hundred million to even a billion dollars in foregone parking revenue -- a lot to pay to outsource the political will to raise rates. Additionally, none of the upfront payment will be dedicated to transportation improvements. The bulk of the money will go to balancing the budget and fiscal "stabilization" with $100 million earmarked for social programs.

Chicago will soon have the highest meter rates in the United States. The 8,100 meters in the Loop Central Business District will rise 50 cents to $3.50/hour next month and $6.50 by 2013. Neighborhood rates will quadruple to $1 an hour next year and reach $2 by 2013. (San Francisco's SFpark is also raising rates, though it's not clear how fast and by how much.)

Daley’s press press release further details how meter rates will be set:

• The City will implement graduated meter rate increases over a period of five years that will bring rates closer to market level. After that, any increases will be subject to the approval of the city council and are expected to be at the rate of inflation.
• These increases will be the first in more than 20 years for more than 25,000 of the 36,000 meters.
• By the middle of 2011, all meters must have both cash and cashless payment options.The City Council retains the right to revise the meter increases, change the number of meters or the hours of operation. But to the extent the City takes action that negatively impacts meter revenue, it will be obligated to make the private operator whole.

Despite its problems, the Chicago deal should send a loud message to New York, and other big US cities, that they are leaving huge sums of potential public revenue untapped, and contributing to traffic congestion and air pollution by leaving meter rates too low.

Photo: itsbetteronamac/Flickr

Now, as the country teeters on the edge of a dire recession, increased transportation spending is starting to look like a core building block in a federal stimulus package that would, ideally, bring about job creation, increased international competitiveness and improved environmental sustainability. Today, Nobel Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman helped make the case, using the kind of "fix it first" and pro-transit examples promoted by Build for America at Wednesday's press conference.

And this is also a good time to engage in some serious infrastructure spending, which the country badly needs in any case. The usual argument against public works as economic stimulus is that they take too long: by the time you get around to repairing that bridge and upgrading that rail line, the slump is over and the stimulus isn’t needed. Well, that argument has no force now, since the chances that this slump will be over anytime soon are virtually nil. So let’s get those projects rolling.

Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Maybe not officially, but the agency's minimum residential parking requirements are a big inducement to car commute. That's the implicit finding of a new study by University of Pennsylvania planning professor Rachel Weinberger (and others, including yours truly), released today by Transportation Alternatives and a who’s who of leading planning, transit and environmental groups. The study, "Guaranteed Parking -- Guaranteed Driving" [PDF], compares Park Slope, Brooklyn with Jackson Heights, Queens, and finds that, despite Park Slope having higher car ownership, Jackson Heights residents are 45 percent more likely to drive to work in the Manhattan Central Business District and 28 percent more likely to commute by car in general.

And it isn't because Jackson Heights has no transit options. Commuters in both neighborhoods are served by multiple subway and bus lines, and the ratios of transit trip times to driving times are comparable. Additionally, other proven predictors of travel choice suggest Park Slope commuters are more likely to drive, not less. Park Slope is wealthier, denser and has higher home ownership. It also has a higher proportion of government employees. 

The study's key research finding is that in Jackson Heights, 31 percent of car owners have a parking spot at home, compared to only 5 percent of Park Slope drivers. The study concludes that because of this, Park Slope car owners, who do not want to lose their coveted curbside spots, are less likely to drive to work.

The reason for the parking disparity is that much more of Jackson Heights has been built since 1963, when the city zoning code introduced residential parking requirements. The finding has far reaching sustainability implications, since the Department of City Planning requires driving-inducing residential parking for between 40 and 150 percent of new dwelling units.

In August, Weinberger teamed with Transportation Alternatives and other groups concerned about parking reform to issue "Suburbanizing the City". That study estimated that the city's parking requirement would generate a billion miles of new traffic a year by 2030. "Guaranteed Parking" substantiates that finding, and provides more evidence that New York City zoning regulations promote driving to work, even when viable transit options are available.

Last week we visited the city’s parking doctor and got the wrong medicine. In this episode of city parking malpractice, the parking doctor is doing the wrong tests.

In Manhattan south of 60th Street, new off-street parking is allowed only by special permits issued by the City Planning Commission. This rule is the main transportation legacy of the federal Clean Air Act in New York City. It stems from a long-running legal challenge from environmentalists dating back to the late 1970s. The rule has resulted in the Manhattan Central Business District having one of the lowest ratios of parking to people in the developed world.

Unfortunately, this success story is being swamped by a wave of accessory parking in new residential towers. According to Lindsey Lusher at Transportation Alternatives, city records indicate new parking in the Clean Air Act zone is being built at a record pace. It turns out that the City Planning Commission, with the consent of the Manhattan Borough President, "can" grant special permits for new parking in the Clean Air Zone. However, due to court decisions and political pressure from real estate developers, the planning commission has approved hundreds, perhaps thousands, of special permits, and attempted to disapprove only a handful.

A key legal reason for this promiscuous permitting is the strange way New York City’s environmental laws are interpreted when it comes to parking. Each new parking garage is considered in isolation from its neighbors. Because of this, the coalition of environmental and planning groups which released the "Suburbanizing the City" parking report asked the mayor to change the environmental review process for parking.

2. Revise environmental rules so that parking impacts are fully accounted for.

We recommend that the city revise CEQR rules for the special permitting process so that the cumulative impact of new parking garages on neighborhoods is considered. Currently, the impacts of a new parking garage are considered in isolation from impacts of other new parking garages. The cumulative impact of large amounts of parking are not considered, and overall impact of additional traffic on neighborhoods is ignored. For example, in Hells Kitchen in Midtown Manhattan, thousands of new residential parking spaces have been added in recent years. Yet, there has been no assessment of the cumulative traffic or environmental impact. Impacts of each new garage are assessed only if the garage generates 50 or more car trips in a peak hour. The problem with this approach is that two or more nearby garages could generate many more than 50 cars per hour, even though each individual garage would not. The net result of this approach is that very large traffic impacts are being ignored. One way for the City to deal with this issue would be to set a maximum number of parking spaces that would be environmentally acceptable, based on an environmental review, for each area of the city. These environmental reviews would consider cumulative effects. Once the maximums are set, special permits would be granted only if the total number of parking spaces within each area remained below the maximum acceptable number.

The groups know full-well that revising CEQR is a major undertaking. But an environmental law this myopic and ineffectual does little to further the public good and must be changed.

Photo of Chelsea traffic by ATHLETE Director Dave/Flickr

What would you do if you went to the doctor, and before speaking to you, taking your vital signs, or learning about your condition, she prescribed a powerful drug and kicked you out the door?

New York City's land-use doctor is the City Planning Commission, and the drug it doles out is the Zoning Resolution, a 1960s-era set of laws that is gradually transforming swaths of the city into more suburban, car oriented environments.

City zoning requires substantial parking at all new residential buildings. In many neighborhoods that means an astoundingly higher level of parking. For instance, the Zoning Resolution requires new residential buildings in walkable Park Slope to have eight times more off-street parking than the existing housing stock. So what does the planning commission base its powerful prescription on? Not much, according to Suburbanizing the City [PDF], a study just released by Transportation Alternatives, the Regional Plan Association and a host of other prominent transportation and planning groups. The study projects a billion miles of new driving by 2030 due to the planning commission's off-street parking requirements. Yet, in the recommendations accompanying the report, the groups write:

It appears that City planners do not know how much off-street parking exists, how much parking is planned and permitted, or how existing or planned new parking contributes to traffic, air pollution and carbon emissions.

As a first step toward diagnosing the extent of the parking problem, the groups ask the mayor to "fully assess the amount of existing and planned off-street parking" and take the following actions to accomplish that:

• Inventory existing and planned off-street parking. The City should create a complete, public, inventory of existing, permitted and planned off-street parking. Using this information, the City should fully assess the relationship between residential, retail and commercial parking requirements, driving and travel choice. This information will provide a baseline to assess the impact of additional parking.
• Measure how much driving is created by new off-street parking. City agencies do not know the impact of new parking. Neither the Department of City Planning nor the Department of Transportation have computer models, surveys, sampling or studies that reveal the local or cumulative impact of parking requirements.
• Determine parking demand based on the assumption that off-street parking has a cost. Currently, the Department of City Planning and environmental documents project demand for parking based on the assumption that it is free. This results in very high demand assumptions. The City should estimate demand for off-street parking based on appropriate price levels.
• Measure the effect of increases in parking growth on neighborhood and citywide traffic congestion. Through permits and as of right building, the City is increasing the city’s off-street parking supply, while the capacity of the street network remains static. New traffic as a result of new cars on the road (facilitated by the availability of parking) must be closely analyzed.

Given the mayor's sustainability push and the highly-touted PlaNYC, it seems logical that the City Planning Commission would take a careful look at Robert Moses-era, driving-inducing parking requirements. But old habits die hard. Ask the doctors. For hundreds of years they tried to cure the common cold by bleeding the patient. For some, the cold went away; many others died.

Photo: Ben Fried

Whether privatization is the right way to unlock New York City's parking riches is debatable. What's not in question is that curbside parking in New York and most U.S. cities is grossly underpriced and could potentially be a crucial source of revenue for much needed transportation improvements. Chicago has chosen to outsource the political will to raise meter prices. Cities with the gumption to raise their own meter prices will keep much more of the revenue. That said, at least Chicago is doing something about its parking dysfunction, and will get the very real benefits of reduced cruising traffic and double parking.

The Bond Buyer reports that Chicago expects to raise more than a billion dollars upfront when it awards a minimum 50-year concession to operate its curbside parking meter system. Ten corporate consortiums are bidding for the contract, which is expected to go before the City Council in the fall. According to Transportation Alternatives' recent report Pricing the Curb [PDF], Chicago will require vendors to use state-of-the-art parking meters that monitor parking space availability and adjust rates to ensure an open space on every block. Chicago will raise meter rates as part of the deal.

Chicago's 36,000 parking meters generated $23 million in 2007. New York City's 75,900 meters produced $114 million. (New York anticipates $120 million in meter revenue in 2008.)

Chicago leads the U.S. in privatization deals or "public-private partnerships." It leased the Chicago Skyway toll-way in a 99-year deal with a multinational consortium in 2005 for $1.82 billion. It followed up that deal with another 99-year lease of four downtown parking garages to a private operator for $563 million in 2006.

Mayor Daley says Chicago will use lump sums from the privatization deals to create a reserve fund which will generate interest for long-term infrastructure investments and to pay down debt and pension obligations. But some Chicago City Council members have expressed concern about the proposed parking privatization and higher meter rates. "We saw that in the Skyway. Fees went up. If we lose control of that, the citizens have nobody to complain to. They're not going to listen to John Q. Citizen," Transportation Committee chairman Tom Allen (38th) told the Sun Times.

Photo: jeanphony/Flickr

Starting in September, the $23 million SFpark program will use an array of new policies and technologies to raise meter prices during peak periods, so as to make parking more easily available, thereby reducing rush hour driving, cruising for spaces and double parking. SFpark will include 6,435 curbside spots. This is a quarter of San Francisco's curbside parking, and is roughly comparable to the 6,500 metered curbside spots in Manhattan south of 60th Street. The project also includes variable pricing for the 11,677 off-street spots managed by the city.

According to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom,"The idea is to give people more choice, more convenience and to reduce congestion."

SFPark is a portion of San Francisco's Urban Partnership congestion pricing proposal to the USDOT. Though it will generate substantial revenue, the feds will pay $18 million of the start-up costs. SFpark is the parking component of an overall congestion reduction plan which also includes peak hour tolling near the Golden Gate Bridge, along with bus and other transit improvements. 

The underlying premise of SFpark is that the city wants to reduce driving, and will not attempt to do so by building more parking. Nor does the city want to suffer from parking shortages, manifested as double parking and congestion caused by cruising for spots. Instead, SFpark will raise meter prices so that demand is reduced to equal the existing parking supply. During peak periods, meters will be priced high enough to ensure some parking is always available. During off-peak times, meter prices will go down, so that most spots are used. The idea is that if you really have to drive, you shouldn't have to cruise around or risk a ticket. Along with an easier time finding parking during peaks, and lower prices when and where there is lower demand, other carrots for motorists include easing time limits during periods of low demand, enabling payment by cell phone, and delivering text messages to drivers when their meters are running out.

Historically, big city parking policies have been based on a mixture of political pandering, myths and half-truths. (New Yorkers can thank their City Council for the traffic congestion caused by eliminating Sunday metering, keeping meters artificially cheap, and limiting when meters are on and where they are located.) Curbside parking in San Francisco is notoriously scarce and a big political issue. But unlike New York City, SFpark shows that San Francisco actually has the political will to do something about the problem.

SFpark is a big experiment. Extensive data will be collected to form accurate conclusions regarding policies and technologies. Different neighborhoods will be used to test different measures, while some will be "control areas" where parking rates and rules will remain the same. At the conclusion of a one-year trial period, San Francisco will assess what worked and what didn't. Aspects that worked, which project designers are confident will include some forms of variable pricing, will be kept and applied across the city. The results will be closely watched elsewhere, since no other large U.S. city is doing anything remotely as ambitious or intelligent.

Politically, it will be fascinating to see how one of the most progressive cities in the country addresses the real and imaginary issues raised by making motorists pay a more realistic price for the public space they use.

Now that the Legislature has said "no" to pricing streets, attention has turned to pricing curbside parking. It's no secret that meter rates are ridiculously low. This is because the DOT has been told by generations of mayors to keep the price down in an effort to appease motorists. The cost of this ill-considered gesture is a plague of cruising traffic, rampant double parking, congested streets, and motorists with nowhere to park paying $600 million a year in parking tickets.

The challenge for Mayor Bloomberg's DOT is how to change public attitudes conditioned by decades of artificially low prices. DOT has painful memories of City Council's 2005 decision to overrule a mayoral veto and suspend Sunday parking meters. The legislation was passed without an environmental review, and has gridlocked shopping streets, while costing taxpayers $20 million a year in lost revenue.

There is a politically popular way to overcome resistance to higher meter rates. City Hall should guarantee some of the meter revenue to neighborhood pedestrian cycling and transit improvements. Washington, DC and LA are doing it and it works. Transportation Alternatives, a number of Business Improvement Districts and internationally recognized authorities like UCLA's Donald Shoup have urged New York City to give it a try. Unfortunately, the same City Hall that urged lawmakers to have an open mind on congestion pricing has been adamant that the city's practice of sending all revenue to the general fund is unchangeable. Unlike congestion pricing, the size and scope of a "revenue return" pilot program would be easily adjustable and could work as an opt-in program combined with Residential Parking Permits.

Admittedly, revenue return is just one part of a much larger equation. But the harsh reality for a reform-minded DOT is that while there are pockets of support, there is no popular hue and cry for higher meter rates. The way out of this political gridlock is to give neighborhoods a direct stake in local parking reform by reinvesting some parking revenue in new sidewalks, traffic calming and bus improvements the average person can experience and appreciate.

Photo: English Man in New York City/Flickr

In a first for a big east coast city, Washington, DC, is putting the ideas of celebrated parking reformer Don Shoup to work. Spurred by concerns over game day traffic surges caused by the opening of a new baseball stadium, the city council recently created two performance parking pilot project zones. The most important provision of the legislation is that 75 percent of the meter revenue, after initial expenses and maintenance, "Shall be used solely for the purpose of non-automobile transportation improvements in that pilot zone." This includes a menu of transit, bicycling and pedestrian improvements including sidewalk widenings, traffic calming, separated bikeways and real-time information signs for buses and trains.

The project is especially exciting, because once parking money from the pilot zones begins to translate into actual neighborhood improvements, DC voters will want more parking reform and parking revenue return in their neighborhoods.

The force behind the legislation was Council Member Tommy Wells, whose campaign slogan, "For a Livable and Walkable Community," is prominently featured on his web site. Wells says he held "over a dozen community meetings and town halls" to build a consensus around the plan. His work seems to have paid off. The new zones and especially the revenue return provision have been cheered by the press and local livable streets advocates, including those at Greater Greater Washington.org.

Along with using "revenue return" to create a constituency for parking reform, the basic idea behind Shoup's work, and DC's performance parking zones, is simple: underpriced curbside parking meters result in completely full curbs and low turnover, which in turn causes parking shortages and cruising and double parking. The problem is solved by raising and lowering meter rates to achieve vacancy targets.

Other highlights of Washington's new performance parking zones:

• Curbside vacancy targets of 10 percent to 20 percent
  
• Gradual meter rate increases capped at $0.50 a month
  
• Authority to the DC DOT to "adjust parking fines as needed"
  

It's unclear if the DC DOT will vary prices during peak and off-peak periods to achieve the vacancy targets.

Alas, Shoupian doctrine didn't escape the legislative meat grinder unscathed. The DC law undercuts itself by turning off meters on holidays, freezing meter rates in some areas and, worst of all, exempting Residential Parking Permit holders from meters in other areas. However, on balance, DC's new parking experiment is an exciting step forward and should serve to inspire the New York City Council to get smart about solving New York's parking dysfunction.

Photo: pickles_pics/Flickr