Parking

The Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, the union representing public school principals and other administrative personnel, wants free parking for its members, and is suing the city to get it.

Yesterday, my Mets got shut out by the last-place Nationals, falling 10 games behind the defending world champion Phillies. Meanwhile, the Yankees grabbed sole possession of first place -- for the first time in months! -- after beating Baltimore. It pains me just to type the words.

Last September, Manhattan Community Board 12 tabled a resolution in support of a new Greenmarket for W. 185th Street in Washington Heights. The effort to locate the market was community-driven -- a neighborhood resident gathered 1,000 signatures in support of it -- the board's parks committee was enthusiastically in favor, and the city's Greenmarket office was in the process of securing a tow truck to remove errant vehicles. But the idea stalled when a handful of area residents predicted the market would draw noisy early-morning crowds, and complained that it would tie up the street's 19 parking spots for a few hours a week.

It appears Chicago politicians who privatized city parking meter operations traded short-term political gain for long-term fiscal pain.

Tuesday's post about the Fifth Avenue bike lane in Park Slope gave me the chance to talk to several retail merchants about how they receive their deliveries, and whether the Class 2 bike lane is causing them any trouble. According to Fifth Avenue BID director Irene LoRe, the bike lane makes it tougher for delivery drivers to do their job and adds to the cost of doing business. But based on my conversations with other restaurant owners and retailers, there is little support for this view among merchants on the strip.

Just about every New York City neighborhood has to deal with the consequences of dirt cheap on-street parking. When you practically give away spaces at rock-bottom prices, it guarantees double parking and endless cruising for spots by bargain hunting drivers. Which is bad news for all the bus riders, cyclists, and delivery drivers who have to contend with the clogged curbs, extra traffic, and lane-blocking vehicles that result.

"Have placard-bearing drivers begun their own reclaiming of reclaimed public space?"

In what looks like a big win for community livable streets advocates, the Hell's Kitchen Neighborhood Association has settled its long-standing lawsuit over parking in the Hudson Yards area, where the Bloomberg administration sought the construction of thousands of new spaces. 

Former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, widely credited as the architect of PlaNYC, spoke at the Museum of the City of New York last week on the potential impact of Mayor Bloomberg's signature program. According to City Room, Doctoroff considers the two-year-old environmental blueprint on par with such grand projects as Central Park and the development of the Manhattan street grid.