Streetsblog New York City

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and her city-owned Chevy Suburban in 2008. Photo copyright Steven Hirsch.

To hear Christine Quinn tell it, New Yorkers are crying out for relief from unjust parking policies. Over the last two years, it seems that when City Council members weren’t flogging legislation to add layers of bureaucracy to DOT’s street safety program, they were tripping over themselves to absolve motorists of one responsibility after another.

No matter that most New York commuters don’t drive to work. Or that drivers would be best served by rational prices for on-street parking, not endless cruising for free spots. Or even that one bill, prohibiting the sanitation department from placing stickers on vehicles parked in the path of street sweepers, would put an end to a practice that has benefited the entire city by improving street cleanliness. Nothing has stood in the way of Chris Quinn’s mission to free the put-upon car owner from the tyranny of onerous city edicts.

Including public opinion, it appears. According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, a majority of city voters disagree with Quinn and the council that city sanitation stickers are “unnecessarily punitive.” The poll found that 60 percent of voters, including 57 percent who park on the street, support the use of the stickers.

Support for the yellow stickers ranges from 56 – 40 percent each in Brooklyn and The Bronx to 66 – 26 percent in Manhattan. Men are stuck on the stickers 63 – 33 percent while women want them 57 – 37 percent. There is little partisan difference.

“Even voters who park on the street and do the Alternate Side Parking dance are stuck on the stickers by a wide margin,” said poll director Maurice Carroll in a Quinnipiac media release.

You’ll recall that the sanitation sticker bill was the brainchild of Brooklyn Council Member David Greenfield, who promoted it with characteristic zeal (“I mean, what’s next? We’re going to start slashing people’s tires when they don’t park on the correct side?”). It was also championed by transportation committee chair James Vacca, who called the stickers “cruel.” Weighed against the reality of voter sentiment, such inflammatory rhetoric makes the council look out of touch. It could be that New Yorkers aren’t as worked up about this stuff as their electeds think.

You don’t have to be a political scientist to know that governing by pet peeve is not likely to result in sound policy. Now that Speaker Quinn and the council have impartial evidence that a small number of gripes doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of the electorate at large, maybe they will turn their attention to actual problems, starting with the hundreds of fatalities and thousands of injuries suffered on city streets every year.

Southwest corner of Park Terrace West and W. 218th Street. Photos: Brad Aaron

The city recently replaced four parking spots at Park Terrace West and W. 218th Street, in Inwood, with a no standing zone. The 34th Precinct reportedly requested the change to give drivers exiting Park Terrace West, a northbound one-way street, a better view of east-west traffic on 218th.

Inevitably, car owners accustomed to parking at the intersection complained, and those complaints, many of which were posted on a neighborhood email list, led to a story by DNAinfo. Here’s a taste:

At least seven residents said they were ticketed or towed after the new signs went up late last month.  Local parenting email list InwoodKids was recently flooded with parent complaints about the new parking regulations.

Inwood mother Beth More said she and her husband were ticketed and towed in the new zone on Jan. 5 after arriving home from the holidays.

“We had no idea the new signs were posted,” she told DNAinfo. “In fact, we were sure our car was stolen at first and never even thought to look up.”

The couple has appealed the $75 parking ticket and will fight for reimbursement of the $185 tow charge.

“I, like many others in the neighborhood, question if this really was a matter of safety or simply an opportunity for the city and police precinct to ticket more,” she said.

Several city and police sources said summonses issued just days after the new signs were installed are likely to be dismissed.

In case the no standing signs still don’t get the message across — a possibility, considering the illegally parked car out of frame in the above photo — on Sunday I saw a couple of homemade posters warning drivers not to park near the intersection.

I have driven this corner. I also walk it regularly. As a driver it was very difficult to detect whether cars on 218th were approaching without either inching into the Park Terrace West crossing or nosing into cross traffic. As a pedestrian I also appreciate that drivers have better sightlines. While it’s understandable that some were angry about being caught off guard, the idea that the city would look to raise revenue by clearing four parking spots at a blind intersection — and installing the proper signage, no less — smacks of Agenda 21-level paranoia.

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In case you’re just tuning in, all that taxpayer-subsidized parking built for the new Yankee Stadium has failed beyond anyone’s wildest expectations.

Yankee Stadium parking in its natural state. Photo: Daily News

In today’s Daily News, Juan Gonzalez reports that Bronx Parking Development Company LLC is expected to default this year on the $200+ million in triple-tax-exempt bonds issued by the New York City Industrial Development Agency, the financing arm of the New York City Economic Development Corporation. Since the threat of default has loomed for some time now, let’s look at the more recent developments cited by Gonzalez.

The promise of jobs to be created by the garages was never that grand to begin with — 12 full-time and 70 part-time positions, with an average wage of $11 an hour. But Bronx Parking LLC is so desperate for cash, writes Gonzalez, that “the company plans to slash the salaries of a handful of full-time garage employees and to reduce the number of game-day parking attendants from 76 to 57.”

“The people who continue to pay the price for this thing are the kids who lost their park space, and now the handful of people who got jobs and are going to lose them,” says Bettina Damiani, project director of Good Jobs New York, an NGO that has tracked the stadium project from its inception.

On top of that, a proposal to lure a hotel to complement or replace the garages has apparently cratered after four developers who expressed interest in the deal wanted “major city subsidies.” Gonzalez reports that Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., who inherited the stadium parking disaster from his predecessor Adolfo Carrion, “has been pressing City Hall to come up with an emergency plan to restructure the bonds, tear down some of the garages, and replace them with low-income housing.”

How bad is it for Bronx Parking LLC? According to Gonzalez its garages are 38 percent full on Yankee game days. When the stadium is idle, they have a total of 70 regular customers for 9,000 spaces.

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A rendering of the Rudin family plans for new condos at the site of St. Vincent's Hospital. Rudin wants to include 152 parking spaces, while the community board wants zero. Image: Rudin via WSJ.

The City Planning Commission approved a Rudin family request to build 50 percent more parking than allowed at the site of the former St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. The commission’s unanimous approval came last Monday despite opposition to the parking garage from the local community board and evidence that Rudin hadn’t met the city’s own requirements for granting exemptions to parking maximums.

The advisory recommendations supposedly guiding the commission had been split over the garage. Community Board 2 urged that no garage be allowed at all, as the entrance would be the fourth on a single residential block of West 12th Street. Borough President Scott Stringer, however, approved of the Rudin request to build 152 parking spaces, rather than the 98 the developers would be allowed under the city’s parking maximums.

Additionally, the commission’s report suggests that all community members who testified on the issue of the parking garage at its public hearing opposed the extra parking spaces. “A number of speakers in opposition stated a concern for the proposed garage on 12th Street,” reads the report [PDF]. “These speakers said that the requested special permit to increase the size of the garage should be denied.”

Regardless of those recommendations, it’s debatable whether Rudin was even eligible for a special permit to exceed the parking maximums. To get such a permit, developers need to show that there isn’t enough available parking in the area to meet the projected demand from project residents.

Calculations performed by both Streetsblog and the Municipal Art Society show that wasn’t the case in the Village. “When the residential units are expected to be built there will be 740 available overnight spaces and 154 available weekday midday spaces within a quarter mile radius of the site,” wrote MAS in testimony submitted to the City Planning Commission [PDF]. “This is more than enough spaces to accommodate the 137 cars that the applicant is estimating will result from the addition of 450 new housing units.”

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On Monday we published the revised schedule for this week’s City Council hearing in James Vacca’s transportation committee. Out with oversight of the MTA budget and its consequences for straphangers, in with bills to make parking more convenient. Maybe we were being a little unfair with that post, because the person who ultimately sets the agenda for the City Council isn’t Vacca, but Speaker Christine Quinn.

Under Speaker Chistine Quinn, shown here with council members James Vacca and Diana Reyna, the current City Council has added red tape for bike projects and reduced incentives to obey parking rules. Photo: DNAinfo

A year ago Quinn made it clear that her top transportation priority wouldn’t be improving conditions for straphangers or making streets safer for walking and biking. Nope. In a city where 54 percent of households don’t own cars, Quinn focused on reducing the perceived inconvenience of storing cars on public streets.

Now the speaker is getting her moment in the spotlight from this agenda, with the passage of three bills yesterday. One would ban the Sanitation Department from placing stickers on cars that violate alternate-side parking rules. The Sanitation Department opposes the legislation, but the bill has enough votes on the council to override a mayoral veto. Another would let motorists escape a ticket if they show the parking enforcement officer a muni-meter receipt timestamped within five minutes of the violation, and the third would give illegal parkers more time before late fees kick in on their violations.

The 54 percent who don’t own cars get nothing out of this package, except maybe dirtier streets.

The real irony is that car owners don’t get much out of these bills either. The fact is that parking will remain a headache as long as New York gives away most of its scarce curbside space for free, or at bargain rates.

The City Council could learn a few things from San Francisco, where car owners are incurring fewer parking tickets thanks to a program that aligns parking prices with demand. Rather than bend over backward to address a few pet peeves, Quinn and Vacca would do more to lessen parking dysfunction by encouraging the city to move quickly with its own program to put the right price on curbside space. Instead, any time the city tries to adjust meter rates, the council is the loudest opponent.

After the jump, read the email blast that Quinn’s office sent out yesterday claiming victory against “unfair” and “unnecessarily punitive” parking enforcement.

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A line of yellow parking sensors, each roughly the size of a hockey puck, lines a block of East 187th Street in the Bronx. Photo: Noah Kazis

New York City took a significant step today toward modernizing the way it allocates scarce curbside parking spaces, but it remains to be seen whether the city will embrace the full potential its new parking tech.

At a press conference in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx this morning, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and City Council Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca announced the installation of 177 parking sensors. Using magnets, the sensors can detect not only the presence of a vehicle, but the moment individual cars enter or leave spaces and the “magnetic signature” of individual vehicles. The sensors can be linked to parking meters and to enforcement officers in real-time.

The city hopes to use this batch of sensors to test out a smartphone app showing drivers how many on-street spaces are open on a given block. But more transformative changes like using the sensors to rationalize parking pricing, as in San Francisco, or to beef up parking enforcement as is common in Europe, aren’t yet in the works for New York City.

For the next three months, the city will just be checking to see whether the sensors can stand up to “the rigors of the streets of New York,” said Sadik-Khan, including inclement weather and street-sweeping.

If the sensors are tough enough, the city expects to unveil its parking app sometime around April. For a given stretch of spaces, the app will tell drivers whether there are fewer than two spaces available, two to three, or four or more. “We’re making it easier for drivers to park,” said Sadik-Khan. Neither the parking regulations in the area nor parking enforcement will change, she said.

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The City Council is again looking to placate scofflaw drivers. This time, Council Member David Greenfield of Brooklyn wants to limit cases in which the city can tow vehicles belonging to drivers who have racked up hundreds of dollars in unpaid parking fines. DNAinfo has the story:

Admitting the problem is the first step. Photo: Brooklyn Paper

“Any driver who has been towed knows that a trip to the impound lot can be one of the most frustrating experiences in New York City,” Greenfield said.

Under the new legislation, instead of towing, vehicles would be locked with devices called “boots,” which prevent drivers from moving until they call in and pay their outstanding fines, plus a $50 processing fee. Once paid, drivers receive a code that allows them to unlock the boot and drive away, as long as they return the boot.

Cars left booted for 72 hours could be towed under the bill, as could cars parked in tow zones, bus stops, crosswalks, fire hydrants or driveways.

Greenfield said the bill comes after numerous complaints from residents who accused the city of unfairly targeting them to make cash.

Drivers whose cars are towed under the current system have to schlep to an impound lot and then pay $185 in towing and $20 in storage a day, in addition to tickets, Greenfield said.

“This bill would give drivers a chance to pay their debts to the city without wasting an entire day trying to retrieve their vehicle,” he said. “It’s a simple and fair way for the city to enforce its parking laws without excessively punishing drivers.”

Retrieving a car from impound has got to be a frustrating ordeal, which is pretty much the point. Not that the boot itself isn’t a deterrent, but if nothing else this is further evidence of a City Council preoccupied with making life easier for motorists who believe laws should not apply to them.

Of course this is old hat for Greenfield, whose obsession with loosening parking regulations seemingly knows no bounds, and who a year ago went online to rant about the city clearing snow for safer walking and biking. Yet when reckless drivers inflict serious injury and death in his district, Greenfield has nothing to say.

Greenfield’s bill has been referred to the transportation committee, with support from council members including Brad Lander, Tish James, Lew Fidler, Robert Jackson and Ydanis Rodriguez.

Times critic Michael Kimmelman and NYC Planning Director Amanda Burden on a walking tour of the South Bronx last year. Image: NYT

The fight to eliminate parking minimums in New York City just went mainstream.

As part of a wide-ranging exploration of parking lots and public space set to run in Sunday’s paper, New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman signed on to the growing list of people urging New York City’s Department of City Planning to scrap the costly and outdated requirements that force new developments in most of the city to include parking. The whole article is well worth a read, but here’s Kimmelman’s NYC-specific recommendation:

For big cities like New York it is high time to abandon outmoded zoning codes from the auto-boom days requiring specific ratios of parking spaces per housing unit, or per square foot of retail space. These rules about minimum parking spaces have driven up the costs of apartments for developers and residents, damaged the environment, diverted money that could have gone to mass transit and created a government-mandated cityscape that’s largely unused. We keep adding to the glut of parking lots. Crain’s recently reported on the largely empty garages at new buildings like Avalon Fort Greene, a 42-story luxury tower near downtown Brooklyn, and 80 DeKalb Avenue, up the block, both well occupied, both of which built hundreds of parking spaces to woo tenants. Garages near Yankee Stadium, built over the objections of Bronx neighbors appalled at losing parkland for yet more parking lots, turn out never to be more than 60 percent full, even on game days. The city has lost public space, the developers have lost a fortune.

Kimmelman hits the nail on the head, noting that the parking requirements are an environmental disaster in America’s most car-free city, an obstacle to the construction of badly-needed housing, and often incompatible with good urban design. In calling for the outright elimination of parking minimums, Kimmelman goes far beyond the reforms being hinted at by DCP. Right now, DCP is only considering a reduction in parking minimums and only in a few neighborhoods near the Manhattan core. No actual proposal to cut the “inner ring” parking requirements has been released, though DCP has proposed eliminating parking minimums for affordable housing in the Manhattan core.

Kimmelman’s endorsement should carry weight at DCP, however. DCP director Amanda Burden prides herself on her commitment to urban design and she took Kimmelman on a tour of the South Bronx for his inaugural article as architecture critic. If anyone can persuade Burden to act boldly, it might be him.

In the video, an early morning car commuter, presumably someone working on the nearby Barclays Center arena project, apparently decides that the last parking space on this block of Pacific Street (between Sixth Avenue and Carlton Avenue) is too small to accommodate his SUV, so he makes his own free parking by uprooting a No Standing sign. Oder says the vandalism and flouting of parking regs is symptomatic of the un-monitored violations around the Atlantic Yards construction zone, including trucks double-parking and idling.

This isn’t the first time that Atlantic Yards workers have torn out this particular No Standing sign, thereby adding about four or five illegal on-street spaces, according to Atlantic Yards Watch. In fact, the maker of this video predicted that the sign “would be destroyed within one day of installation again,” and he was right.

And you thought placards were the ultimate in free parking entitlement.

When plans to reform parking policies in the Manhattan core leaked out of the Department of City Planning last fall, the documents presented a riddle. The proposed changes were solid reforms to successful policies, closing loopholes in the existing parking caps and rationalizing the current system. The draft study which accompanied the reforms, however, seemed to play fast and loose with the facts while arguing for the city to allow parking to eat up more of Manhattan’s valuable space. One hand didn’t seem to know what the other was doing, and with New York’s powerful real estate industry lobbying against the parking maximums, parking reform was in a precarious position.

At the end of the year, though, DCP released the final version of its Manhattan core parking study. The internal conflicts seem to have been resolved, and the results are far more encouraging. The sloppy and misleading analysis is gone and the positive reforms remain.

Assuming that DCP continues on its current path — and that the City Council eventually agrees — Manhattan’s precedent-setting-but-decades-old parking regulations are on track to be updated for the 21st century. Specific language for the new regulations is due in the next few months, according to DCP.

In the final version of its Manhattan core study, DCP says unequivocally that the 30-year-old system of parking maximums has been successful, an endorsement nowhere to be found in the earlier draft.

“The Manhattan Core parking regulations have proved to be compatible with population and job growth and a thriving Central Business District,” the authors write. “In almost three decades since the Manhattan Core regulations were enacted, the Manhattan Core has added population and jobs and has strengthened its position as the vital heart of a world city. Travel into the CBD has shifted toward transit and away from private vehicles.” Those trends aren’t all the result of parking maximums, of course, but the regulations have helped shape the areas below West 110th Street and East 96th Street.

The reforms, which at this point are only described in broad strokes, appear to be the same as those summarized by law firm Kramer Levin last year. One of the last remaining parking minimums in the Manhattan core, which perversely covers affordable housing, is slated to be eliminated. DCP notes that the requirement to build parking “places additional cost burdens on affordable housing developments,” a lesson that will hopefully carry over once the department turns its attention to parking regulations in the rest of the city.

The reforms include a number of other beneficial changes. They would eliminate an incentive to build above-ground parking. Developers seeking to build more parking than allowed as-of-right will face tougher oversight under the revised rules, including new requirements that garages be designed for pedestrian safety. Large-scale developments, perhaps like the parking-stuffed Riverside Center project, will receive comprehensive assessments of the need for parking.

In perhaps the most sweeping change, the distinction between accessory parking, intended only for residents of a given development, and public parking would be eliminated. All parking would be open to everyone — what’s known as a “shared parking” model — which experts hailed as far more appropriate to a dense urban environment.

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