Parking

Are New York City's planning commissioners serious about parking reform? An important test case is shaping up on Manhattan's west side, where Extell Development is trying to build 1,800 parking spaces in an area the size of two city blocks.

City Hall has another big vacancy to fill. This morning the Bloomberg administration announced that Robert Lieber, deputy mayor for economic development, is returning to the private sector. Lieber's portfolio includes the New York City Economic Development Corporation and the Department of City Planning. His departure could create a window of opportunity to fill some of the biggest gaps in the city's sustainability agenda, PlaNYC 2030. 

Reforming New York City parking policy is a critical component of reducing automobile use and building better public spaces. It's becoming increasingly clear that rethinking how we store cars can help address New York City's housing crisis as well. Requiring parking not only creates traffic, it also prevents housing from being built and drives up prices.

This reader account of a run-in with a Traffic Enforcement Agent on Douglass Street in Park Slope is another example of how official privilege often trumps public safety.

In an unusual turn of events, two Brooklyn politicians and one community board are pushing for less off-street parking at the New Domino development proposed for the Williamsburg waterfront. City Council Member Steve Levin and Borough President Marty Markowitz have recently bolstered a resolution from CB 1 calling for hundreds of fewer parking spaces. 

"Folks, you ain't seen nothing yet," Mayor Bloomberg told an Earth Day crowd yesterday. "The best and greenest days are yet to come." The PlaNYC update coming in 2011, he implied, would have a slew of new initiatives to make our city more sustainable, and he's taking suggestions. 

Strict limits on the number of parking spaces that can be built on the far West Side of Manhattan are now in force, a year after the city settled a lawsuit over the issue brought by the Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood Association. The new zoning amendment explicitly states that limiting off-street parking is an important component of building a pedestrian- and transit-oriented neighborhood, and it establishes a first-in-the-city program to track the number of parking spaces in the area.

Via Matt Yglesias, DCist reports that next week Washington area motorists will be able to pay for on-street parking by calling a phone number:

Editor's note: We linked to this story out of San Francisco in the headline stack this morning, and it's worth a very close look. Experts counsel that the first step in reforming parking policies that promote driving is to measure the parking supply. The number one recommendation in "Suburbanizing the City" [PDF], the 2008 report on New York City's traffic-inducing parking policies, is to "create a complete, public inventory of existing, permitted and planned off-street parking." In San Francisco, they're methodically assessing the parking supply so that planners can make more informed decisions. In New York, the Department of City Planning is still groping around in the dark.