Parking

Here's one company doing business in NYC that doesn't want to hear about fleet safety.

Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn is one of the most important segments in the city's bike network, the key passage to and from the Manhattan Bridge. It's also a huge impediment to biking in the city -- the street is rife with double-parking, illegal U-turns, and the unnerving threat of a car door suddenly opening and throwing you into the path of a passing bus. An upcoming redesign of Jay Street should improve the situation, but it too will be hampered by the culture of parking placard abuse that pervades downtown Brooklyn streets.

We're just getting started with Parking Madness 2016 -- our annual hunt for North America's worst parking craters. So far, Washington, D.C., and Rutland, Vermont, have advanced to the second round.

The de Blasio administration and the City Council released more details of their agreed-upon housing plan this afternoon, including a map showing where parking requirements will be reduced. For the most part, it's very good news: Parking requirements will be eliminated for subsidized housing and senior housing in 90 percent of the area originally proposed by City Hall.

Welcome to Parking Madness, Streetsblog's annual Sweet 16 tournament of parking craters. What's a parking crater? Simply put, it's a depression in the cityscape, a void where car storage has usurped land that should be devoted to buildings.

Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito has released an "East Harlem Neighborhood Plan" to guide the city's rezoning of the community, and one of the recommendations is the elimination of parking minimums.

Last week, City Hall's proposal to reduce parking minimums for subsidized housing near transit got a hearing in the City Council, and for the most part it wasn't pretty. Council members may say they want more affordable housing, but for many of them, that support gets shaky if it means requiring less parking in residential development.