Parking

Donald Shoup may be known as a guru of smart parking policy, but even he has found a few surprises in the data collected so far from SFpark.

Many New Yorkers are familiar with car-sharing services -- like Zipcar, Hertz Connect, Enterprise CarShare, and Carpingo -- that charge by the hour or day, with a reserved space where customers must start and finish a round-trip rental. Daimler-owned Car2Go operates differently: it charges by the minute or hour, and is focused on one-way rentals, allowing users to return a car to any on-street space within the company's service area. The company, already operating in ten North American markets, is eyeing New York.

Seth Pinsky, whose legacy as head of the New York City Economic Development Corporation will be years of parking-induced traffic in city neighborhoods, with taxpayers footing the bill, is headed to the private sector.

For five years, Washington, DC, has been preparing a comprehensive rewrite of its zoning code -- including the elimination of parking minimums in areas well-served by bus or rail. Under pressure from opponents afraid it would make it harder for them to find on-street parking, DC planning chief Harriet Tregoning announced on Friday that the city will scale back its parking reforms. Now, parking mandates will be eliminated only in downtown and adjacent neighborhoods, and halved along transit-accessible corridors.

Looking to park at 3059 Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx? There are plenty of options. The property has a garage, not to mention the free on-street parking. But that wasn't enough for the owner of this property, who decided to commandeer some of the public sidewalk, pave it over with asphalt, fence it in, and use the handicapped-accessible pedestrian ramp as the curb cut to a personal driveway.

The viral video of the day, courtesy of Dan Amira at New York Mag, is this bout over a free parking space on the Upper East Side. It's got all the hallmarks of NYC street dysfunction -- traffic backups, aggressive use of motor vehicles, honking, road rage, left jabs.

Architect Seth Goodman is on a mission to illustrate the absurdity of parking requirements. The above image, showing mandatory parking requirements for office buildings in different American cities, is one of three infographics he created to show the extent to which American cities mandate the construction of parking.

The headline from today's City Council transportation committee oversight hearing was Janette Sadik-Khan's announcement that the official launch date for Citi Bike is Memorial Day. Meanwhile, for Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca, it was another occasion to flail at bikes and defend cheap parking under the guise of holding a budget hearing.

This afternoon, the City Council passed the Manhattan Core parking text amendment with a vote of 47-0, with one abstention (Jessica Lappin). The zoning change, which modifies off-street parking rules in the densest parts of Manhattan, is as good as law now, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's approval basically a given.