Rumor Mill: Agencies Will Have to Budget for Parking Permits

2:38 PM EST on November 2, 2006

Word has it that as city agenices flesh out their budgets for next year, Mayor Bloomberg is considering requiring that they include the cost of employee parking permits as a specific budget line item. In other words, if the NYPD or any other agency wants to give out untold hundreds of parking permits to its employees, that is going to cost something and be accounted for. This won't necessarily convince the unions to stop printing bogus parking permits for their members and it won't get the cops to start towing the illegally parked cars of their colleagues but, hey, it's a start.

Transportation researcher Bruce Schaller estimates that the curbside parking spaces consumed by government employees would be worth $46 million per year in parking meter revenue. If government employees drove to work at the same rate as their private sector counterparts, 19,200 fewer cars would enter Manhattan each day.

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

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