Streetsblog New York City

A birds-eye view of the St. Vincent's site redevelopment. Under a deal struck by Christine Quinn's office, the number of parking spaces at the site will be reduced by a third. Image: Rudin Management via DNAinfo

Responding to requests from the community board and advocacy groups, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn did what neither the City Planning Commission nor Borough President Scott Stringer would: reduce the excessive number of parking spaces planned for the Rudin family’s redevelopment of the St. Vincent’s Hospital site.

Originally, Rudin proposed building 152 spaces for 450 luxury apartments. That far exceeded the parking maximums in the Village, which would have allowed only 98 spaces. The local community board unanimously recommended that no garage be built at the site, noting that the entrance would be the fourth on a single block, unprecedented for the area. If parking had to be built, they said, there certainly shouldn’t be any more than allowed by law.

Afterward the community board weighed in, however, officials still supported the Rudin bid for extra parking spaces. Stringer, relying on Rudin’s environmental analysis, argued that without spaces of their own, the development’s residents would put too much pressure on nearby parking garages, even though they would not fill them. Then the City Planning Commission approved the special permit needed to build the extra parking, even though the developers failed to show that they needed to exceed the city’s parking maximums.

Final approval for any zoning change has to go through the City Council. In this case, Christine Quinn, both the Speaker and the local representative, could dictate the outcome. The project was seen as a political challenge for Quinn as she runs for mayor, forcing her to placate both her traditional political base in the Village and the big real estate interests she has courted more recently.

As part of a deal struck Wednesday, the number of parking spaces at the new development will drop from 152 to 95. The number of apartments will also be lowered, however, from 450 to 350, while the total square footage will remain the same. Even with the decrease in housing units, the parking ratio for the project falls from 34 percent to 27 percent. But the smaller parking ratio is still more than allowed for regular developments in the Village.

A spokesperson for Quinn’s office said the parking reduction came in response to the community board’s request but did not speak to Quinn’s position on parking policy more generally.

The Municipal Art Society, which advocated against allowing excess parking at the St. Vincent’s site, applauded the change. “Normally, the Council is reluctant to step in,” said MAS Director of Planning Raju Mann. “Hopefully, this signals some indication on the part of the Speaker’s office that this is an issue they care about and are willing to make changes on high-profile developments for.”

Much of New York City could see parking minimums reduced or eliminated thanks to reforms being pursued by the Department of City Planning. This map shows Streetsblog's rough approximation of the community districts that could be affected by the changes, in green, as well as the Manhattan core where parking maximums are in place, in yellow.

Last month, the New York Times gave some much-deserved attention to the parking reforms working their way through the Department of City Planning. In a pair of articles, real estate reporter Marc Santora revealed how efforts to reform the city’s outdated parking minimums, which promote driving and make housing less affordable, are progressing. (Santora unfortunately made a number of factual errors — misstating the extent of parking maximums in Manhattan, for example.)

Streetsblog checked in with the planning department and can confirm: Parking minimum reform is moving forward faster than expected, with Downtown Brooklyn taking the lead, and could cover a wide swath of the city. At the same time, City Planning is also looking to weaken the Manhattan core’s existing parking maximums near hospitals, in the theater district, and at other locations where the agency deems drivers to be economically important.

Rather than issue a sweeping proposal for the entire “inner ring” of neighborhoods around Manhattan’s central business districts, DCP will first issue a proposal for Downtown Brooklyn, said a department spokesperson. According to Santora, City Planning is likely to recommend eliminating parking requirements entirely for the area, one of the most transit-rich in the country.

The phased approach suggests a political strategy on the part of DCP. While City Planning sustainability director Howard Slatkin has stated that parking minimums are a concession the department needs to make to prevent local opposition to new development, that isn’t a problem in Downtown Brooklyn. There, businesses and developers have been lobbying for years to reduce or eliminate parking minimums, and City Council Member Steven Levin’s office has indicated support for such a reduction in the past.

Reforms for other neighborhoods could come out shortly thereafter. DCP told Streetsblog that the broader inner ring study was nearly complete and would cover all of Upper Manhattan, the South Bronx, Queens from Long Island City and Astoria to Corona, and Brooklyn from Greenpoint to Sunset Park and East New York (the Times only mentioned Brooklyn in its coverage).

It appears less likely that DCP will eliminate parking minimums in these neighborhoods, though strong advocacy from residents and politicians could change that. The inner ring study will treat each of these neighborhoods differently, said DCP, and let each community weigh in on the specific changes to parking regulations in their neighborhood.

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A Whole Foods slated for a site on Third Avenue in Brooklyn will include a 248-space surface parking lot. New research shows the surface lot will discourage local residents from walking to the supermarket. Image: #Crain's

The proposed Gowanus Whole Foods is moving forward after eight years of planning and debate, following a vote by the NYC Board of Standards and Appeals today. With it will come a 248-space surface parking lot: a semi-suburban design plunked down amidst some of Brooklyn’s most walkable neighborhoods.

According to new research by University of Pennsylvania planning professor Rachel Weinberger, whose work on parking minimums Streetsblog highlighted earlier today, putting those spaces in a surface lot will discourage people from walking to the grocery store.

Weinberger’s research, conducted with Donald Maley of the Parsons Transportation Group, compared how local shoppers reached six Philadelphia supermarkets [PDF]. Each store was located in a neighborhood with the fundamental components of walkability: rowhouses or apartment buildings that meet the sidewalk, a street grid without major arterial roads, no big box stores.

Three of the grocery stores, however, had large surface parking lots in front of the entrance, while the other three had a front door on the sidewalk and parking in structures above the store or in off-site structured garages.

Surveying residents living within a half-mile walk of each supermarket, Weinberger and Maley were able to show that residents near the groceries with surface parking lots tended to drive to the store, even though they had a lower car-ownership rate overall. “Controlling for distance, number of children, store loyalty, auto ownership and other factors, residents of study areas near auto-oriented supermarkets are more likely to drive, even though they are less likely to own automobiles, than their counterparts living near pedestrian-oriented markets,” the authors wrote.

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Using satellite photos, UPenn professor Rachel Weinberger created an estimate of how much off-street parking existed citywide, which she then used to show the relationship between parking minimums and car commuting.

Evidence continues to mount that New York City’s mandatory parking minimums encourage people to drive.

New research from University of Pennsylvania planning professor Rachel Weinberger, set to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Transport Policy, shows once again that providing guaranteed off-street parking spaces makes New Yorkers more likely to drive to work. By mandating the construction of parking with new development, the city is encouraging more cars to drive on the city’s already clogged roads.

With the Department of City Planning now considering changes to parking minimums in the “inner ring” of neighborhoods close to the Manhattan core, Weinberger’s research is especially timely. DCP has been loath to acknowledge that mandating the construction of parking induces driving. This data bolsters the argument that eliminating parking minimums will help the city reduce traffic and achieve its sustainability goals.

Weinberger’s article (hat tip to Atlantic Cities’ Eric Jaffe) builds on research she conducted with John Kaehny for Transportation Alternatives, particularly the 2008 report “Guaranteed Parking, Guaranteed Driving” [PDF]. That piece was the first to show that off-street parking spaces attached to residences, the kind that parking minimums require, encourage people to drive to work.

Weinberger’s new research expands that work to all of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens (in Manhattan parking is so much harder, and in Staten Island it’s so much easier, that it’s hard to make a sound comparison). “Instead of focusing on the two case study neighborhoods, it’s a rigorous statistical analysis of the much broader city,” Weinberger told Streetsblog.

The results indicate that residential off-street parking promotes car commuting. “The development of these models demonstrates a clear relationship between increased access to guaranteed parking at home and a propensity to drive to work in the Manhattan Core,” writes Weinberger. “Off-street parking correlates to driving to work both indirectly by its contribution to car ownership and directly by easing car use.”

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Parking spaces keep getting more costly.

Caution: Parking lots can be harmful to your lungs. Photo: UCTC.net

As we often discuss on Streetsblog, parking encourages people to drive rather than ride transit, bike, or walk. And all that asphalt also taxes sewer systems by making vast swaths of urban and suburban land impermeable.

But an overlooked cost is that building and maintaining each parking space belches out poisonous emissions at a prodigious rate — in some ways rivaling emissions from driving. That’s the big news from a study by the University of California Transportation Center.

UCTC researchers analyzed the environmental impact of U.S. parking infrastructure as a whole. Their research compiled the total noxious emissions produced in the process of building and maintaining parking lots — from materials mining to asphalt production, transport and, finally, construction and repair.

Their “life-cycle” analysis showed that each parking space in the United States comes at an annual cost of $6-$23 in health and environmental damages to society caused by air pollution alone. Nationwide, that adds up to between $4 billion and $20 billion annually.

The wide range is due to the difficulty of estimating the total amount of parking in the United States. Researchers examined multiple scenarios — the low-end estimate being 722 million parking spaces, the high-end more than 2 billion — based on available data.

For certain pollutants — such as sulfur dioxide and coarse particle pollution — the emissions caused by parking spaces were actually greater or equal to the amounts produced by driving.

Yet another reason why reforming policies like mandatory parking minimums will result in better public health and wellbeing.

“We hope that our life-cycle assessment will help planners and public officials understand the full cost of parking,” the research team told UCTC’s ACCESS magazine (edited by UCLA professor Donald Shoup). “Underpriced parking not only increases automobile dependence but is also environmentally damaging to construct and maintain.”

Nashville eliminated parking minimums in its downtown in 2010. Despite a meager transit system, the change wasn't controversial. Image: Wikimedia

Want to understand just how twisted the politics of parking are in New York City? Take a look at Nashville, Tennessee.

Two years ago, Nashville scrapped parking minimums completely for its downtown, a fact called to our attention by blogger Charlie Gardner. The elimination of parking mandates in the area seems to have proceeded without controversy, based on contemporary news articles.

New York City, in contrast, is moving toward reducing parking minimums in certain “inner ring” neighborhoods, but it remains to be seen whether they will be eliminated or merely reduced. Here, parking minimums are seen as politically necessary.

Admittedly, downtown Nashville is small compared to the great swaths of New York City covered by parking minimums. The 1,780 rezoned acres hosted around 47,000 workers and 3,344 residents in 2007, when the proposal first started to take shape.

That said, it’s also an area dominated by the automobile. The city’s entire transit system had a ridership of 9.4 million trips over the course of 2008, and less after the economic crash. That’s less than many individual New York City bus lines. The area’s only passenger rail line set a record last year of 1,455 riders in a day.

If Nashville can eliminate parking minimums with minimal fuss, even in just the downtown area, New York City should be able to. That parking minimums still govern most of New York, and that any effort to even reduce them is likely to elicit howls from certain community boards and City Council members, says more about parking politics than what the city actually needs.

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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