Residential parking permits for New York City are on the agenda again thanks to congestion pricing — but ignore the hype because they still don't make any sense.
Congestion pricing is only the latest false impetus for residential parking permits, which pandering elected officials have proposed repeatedly for years. As the politicians and some gullible news outlets would have you believe, the $9 toll on car trips below 60th Street in Manhattan has encouraged hordes of drivers to park as far north as Inwood, where they hop on the subway to finish their commutes.
But this alleged "workaround" makes no sense: A one-way subway fare is $2.90, meaning such drivers would save, at most, $3.20 off the $9 congestion toll (not to mention lots of time). Yet elected officials and the media have claimed, without evidence, that the toll's launch last month compounded the crunch for curbside parking in Manhattan outside of the congestion relief zone.
The latest salvo comes from Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and Council Member Carmen De La Rosa, who put out a video late last week touting a De La Rosa bill — introduced last year, long before congestion pricing began, by the way — to create a residential parking permit pilot program for Manhattan north of 60th Street. Watch it on TikTok below:
In the video, Levine claims there are "more and more cars coming from outside of the city parking on our streets ... trying to avoid the congestion fee" and that the problem is "getting worse."
"A residential parking permit program would not only help prevents cars from outside our city dumped on our streets, it would also help enforce against fake, obstructed and missing license plates," Levine claims in the clip, which provided no evidence. (Levine, declined to comment for this story, but told Crain's that his evidence that congestion pricing has made parking harder is entirely anecdotal.)
In subsequent interviews about her bill, De La Rosa has suggested the cost of the permit would be an "accessible fee" since, as she told NY1, her constituents "don't necessarily want to pay too much money for them." (Any city program would require permission from Albany; state Sen. Robert Jackson and Assembly Member Alex Bores, both Manhattan Democrats, have already proposed legislation in coordination with De La Rosa's effort.)
But a nominal permit fee won't guarantee a spot in Manhattan, where the number of cars already outnumbers on-street spaces, according to researcher Rachel Weinberger, a parking policy expert at the Regional Plan Association. Residential parking permit proponents paint a picture of city streets where it's easier to park and there are fewer out-of-state vehicles, a low-priced fee would change little.
Weinberger likened residential parking permits to a "hunting license" that would be no different from what drivers have now.
As such, people who think about it for a minute realize it doesn't add up: "If it's not [guaranteed], what's the point?" one man on the street told the New York Post earlier this week.
“I think there’s a lot of people who believe it’ll make it easier for them, and they’re not really thinking through all the bigger consequences," Weinberg told Streetsblog, referring to the fact that some people with out-of-state plates are indeed visitors from out of town who want to spend money here. "The neighborhood alone cannot support its own economy, and this just makes it harder for other people to contribute to your economy."
Richard Robbins, an Upper West Side safe streets advocate and car owner, told Streetsblog that residential parking permits are "worth trying" — if only because it would force "people to register their car and pay insurance in the city, when a good percentage of the cars parked on the street are out-of-state plates."
Some history
Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez advocated for residential parking permits in his previous role representing the same district as De La Rosa in the Council. But the agency has long expressed skepticism of the concept, arguing that it would not improve parking availability and be difficult to administer and enforce.
"In New York City, on-street parking scarcity is mainly driven by the large number of resident-owned vehicles compared to the number of spaces available," DOT First Deputy Commissioner Margaret Forgione testified to the City Council in 2018. (Since then, the number of cars registered to New York City residents has increased by hundreds of thousands of cars, with no commensurate increase in curbside space.) DOT declined to offer a position for this story.
A 2019 study by the Manhattan Borough President's Office under Levine's predecessor Gale Brewer analyzed residential parking permit programs in several cities, including London and Stockholm (which both also have congestion pricing). While Stockholm limits the number of permits to the number of available spaces, London, which does not, has seen steady growth in permit-holders, who outnumbered spaces three-to-one at the time of Brewer's study.
San Francisco, meanwhile, concluded that its residential parking permit system led to more demand for parking, not less, Brewer's researchers found.
In Chicago, high demand for parking in higher density neighborhoods has made the Windy City's permit system highly unpopular. The residential parking permit program "creates more headaches, not just for the aldermen but for constituents," the city's then-Clerk Susan Mendoza said in 2016.
Chicagoans "pay the additional $25 and think it guarantees them a spot in front of their home, but it doesn't," Mendoza said. "In congested neighborhoods, there are often more cars on a block than there are spots."
Reached for comment, a spokeswoman for De La Rosa emphasized the "pilot" nature of the Council member's proposal. De La Rosa's intention is to limit the pilot to "residential streets" and use the revenue to fund local "streetscapes, parks and other necessities," said the spokeswoman, Fraynette Familia.
"We are an environmental justice community that is currently transit rich, but car idling and the influx of traffic can have adverse affects on health and quality of life uptown, which we want to try to mitigate," Familia told Steetsblog. "This is one of many ways to do so."
Charles Komanoff, an economist and researcher who has long studied congestion pricing's potential impact on city streets, predicted in a piece for Streetsblog six years ago that a toll of just over $12 would result in some additional drivers parking in neighborhoods just outside the congestion zone in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn. But the current congestion toll of $9 would actually result in fewer drivers looking for parking in those areas than there were before the toll launched on Jan. 5, he said.
Komanoff attributed the drop in drivers trolling for parking spots to the toll's positive impact in reducing gridlock.
"It'll take less time to drive all the way to Midtown or downtown," Komanoff said. "That's because of the combined impact of less traffic."
Komanoff said parking permits would only make sense if the permit was priced to the actual cost of the curb space in the vain of a concept floated by the late Professor Donald Shoup, who proposed charging enough to ensure that one or two spaces per block remain open at all times.
A spot in a garage costs upwards of $800 per month on the Upper West Side and at least $300 further north up Manhattan, according to a quick review of spots available online — indicating the market price for the curb would have to be much, much higher than residential parking proponents have hinted.
"I am not at all myself averse to residential parking permits. The thing I always want to say is: What is the market-clearing price going to be?" Komanoff said.
"A nominal price is not going not really going to ensure that residents will always be able to find a curbside parking space with little or no cruising. There's going to be too many car owners who are going to have these permits."
Drivers already complain when the city repurposes free curbside parking for pedestrian crossing islands, bicycle parking, public car-share and delivery zones. Giving them even a nominal financial interests in the curb would only serve to drive up opposition to crucial street changes, warned Jon Orcutt, a DOT policy director under mayors Mike Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio.
"There's a lot of demand for the curb, and increasing drivers demand to it doesn't help the city at all," Orcutt said. "It's really unfair to the people who do own cars to actually take steps to promise them a parking space — because it's not going to get better."
Just as drivers think they already pay for the roads (they don't), the minute they start paying for parking, the curbside lane will (in their mind) cease to be public space for uses such as pedestrian safety, loading zones, bike lanes, green space or outdoor dining.
