Safety first? Not on the Upper West Side!
Members of Manhattan Community Board 7 refused — twice! — to back a purely symbolic effort to demand that the Department of Transportation prioritize street safety over free parking.
The uptown board's Transportation Committee passed a resolution on Tuesday [PDF] urging the DOT "to prioritize safety" at the curb — but only after removing a crucial phrase that safety should be prioritized "over the storage of private vehicles."
The editing not only neutered the whole point of the resolution, but laid bare the power of the pro-car minority in the neighborhood, said its author.
"By removing [the phrase], it just defangs the resolution," said board member Ken Coughlin. "Everybody’s in favor of 'safety,' but compared to what? That’s the question: what are you willing to sacrifice for safety?"
The final declawed resolution ended up stating simply that "when determining how to use curbside space, CB7 calls on the city’s DOT to prioritize safety." It passed unanimously after the omission of the last six words of the original resolution: "over the storage of private vehicles."
The now-deleted phrase sparked concern among some board members who argued it carried "political" undertones.
"The problem is the language, 'the storage of private vehicles,'" said board member Andrew Rigie, who also heads the restaurant trade group the New York City Hospitality Alliance. "It is a very political position of a segment of the population."
Coughlin offered to swap out the contested terminology with "parking," but the panel still voted to remove the phrasing entirely and just leave in the more vague notion of "safety."
The panel's full board also recently rejected a similarly small-scale resolution in June, which would have backed larger buildings in the neighborhood if their owners asked the city for a single "No Standing" spot outside their entrance.
"This all started with my neighbor who was in her 90s, navigating double-parked cars," said board member Howard Yaruss, who wrote that resolution, at the Tuesday meeting.
Fewer than 30 percent of households on the Upper West Side own a car, according to the U.S. Census, but it has remained an uphill battle to change hearts and minds about reclaiming curb space from the "default" of free motor vehicle storage.
The car-owning minority of Manhattanites is nearly twice as wealthy as their neighbors without motor vehicles, and the rich tend to get the ear of people in power, Coughlin argued.
"It’s a very small minority who parks on the streets, but they wield a very disproportionate amount of influence in our community," he said.
"Whenever we want to make a change to the curb it inevitably comes up that, ‘Oh you’re going to remove parking,’ so I felt it was important that the board be on the record that there’s something more important," he added.
The car-first pushback reared its head again last month, when First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro halted DOT's "Smart Curbs" parking reform pilot at the behest of local Council Member Gale Brewer, who channeled complaints from a handful of drivers upset about the long-proposed installation of meters at several free parking spaces in one of the most transit-dense parts of the country.
The project aimed to combat rampant double parking by charging for about one-10th of the curb in a 14-block area, but it could have gone further to claw back space from cars, experts said.
That project is likely on ice until next year, a DOT liaison told the committee at the Tuesday meeting, due to people claiming they were "blindsided" by the changes. But DOT and the board had worked on that proposal for years, Yaruss noted, and questioned why people opposing the changes could kill all that work.
"We probably had more community input on this issue than any issue I’ve been involved in on my time on the community board," said Yaruss. "There’s always going to be dissension no matter what you do. Why should that dissension be allowed to nix something that we worked really hard with the community come up with."
