Parking

Bike-share, no doubt, is going to be a major addition to the streets of New York -- in terms of both impact and visibility. Within the service area, there's going to be a station every few blocks. And some of those stations are going to have a lot of bicycle docks: 59 in many locations, and a whopping 118 next to Grand Central. Thanks to the small footprint of bikes, however, overall this new form of transit will consume relatively little space while allowing people to make tens of thousands of trips per day.

The Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, or SPURA, is the largest undeveloped, city-owned area south of 96th Street. Located along the south side of Delancey Street at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, SPURA currently consists of five empty lots, the leftovers of a 1967 slum clearance project. Though mid-century towers-in-a-park style housing was built elsewhere on the site, these lots have remained vacant since the tenements were torn down 45 years ago, displacing a population that was two-thirds black and Hispanic.

New York City is still interested in contracting out the operations of its roughly 82,000 metered parking spaces, according to a report in today's Wall Street Journal. A prime motivation, it appears, is the belief that a private company could more quickly roll out high-tech additions to the city's parking system, such as sensors that provide real-time parking data. In the next few weeks, City Hall will put out a request for qualifications to put together a short list of potential private partners.

Parking minimums have struck another blow for terrible urban design, this time just three blocks from the transit mega-hub of Atlantic/Pacific, where nine subway lines and the LIRR converge. A new luxury apartment building going up at the corner of Bergen Street and Third Avenue will dedicate its entire ground floor, facing both the side street and the avenue, to one big, open garage.

When Brooklyn's Barclays Center opens with a Jay-Z concert this September, it will be one of the most transit-accessible arenas in the United States. But as Streetsblog has noted before, the transportation planning for the stadium is excessively car-oriented. Developer Forest City Ratner had been planning to build an 1,100-space surface parking lot, marring the pedestrian environment and inducing more driving to the stadium. As opening day nears, there's good news and bad when it comes to parking.

A reader passes on this notice, one of many distributed on Park Slope windshields. We present it without further comment.

Tom Radulovich, the executive director of the local non-profit Livable City, describes the recent livable streets achievements in San Francisco as "tactical urbanism" -- using low-cost materials like paint and bollards to reclaim street space.

East River Plaza, the big box mall designed for Massapequa and placed in East Harlem, still has a thousand-space parking garage. And given its location in one of the lowest car-ownership neighborhoods in the country, the garage is still as empty as when it opened, despite big subsidies for parkers.

New research from New York University's Furman Center [PDF] provides added evidence that New York's parking minimums are forcing developers to provide unwanted automobile infrastructure, leading to less development, higher housing costs and more traffic.