Downtown Brooklyn

Parking reform in Downtown Brooklyn doesn't go far enough, said developers at a public hearing last night, and the land use committee of Brooklyn Community Board 2 agreed. They want reduced parking requirements to apply not only to new buildings, as proposed by the Department of City Planning, but also to existing buildings and developments under construction. This would allow developers to convert empty floors of parking into retail, housing, or office space.

The proposed reduction of parking minimums in Downtown Brooklyn, though seriously insufficient, is good news for housing affordability and environmental sustainability in New York City. But it's terrible news for those hoping to see broader reforms of New York City's parking requirements. If the Department of City Planning felt so politically constrained that it could only halve parking requirements for market-rate units in Downtown Brooklyn, it's hard to see any meaningful change happening in the rest of the city -- unless residents and activists get serious about advocating for real parking reform.

Downtown Brooklyn's mandatory parking minimums would be cut in half for new development and eliminated outright for affordable housing under a plan from the Department of City Planning. The change is significant -- the first rollback of the costly and car-ownership inducing requirements under the Bloomberg administration -- but doesn't go far enough. Even by DCP's own roundabout admission, the reduced parking minimums will still create an unnecessarily large supply of parking.

Downtown Brooklyn's Willoughby Street plaza, located just off Adams Street, was the forerunner of New York City's current efforts to reclaim roadways as pedestrian spaces. Built in 2006, before Janette Sadik-Khan took over the city Department of Transportation, the city used now-familiar ingredients -- concrete planters and folding chairs -- to close the block to auto traffic and open up space for people to walk and sit.

Walk out on any New York City street and you're likely to find rampant disregard for traffic laws. Pinpointing exactly who's speeding requires special equipment, but for many offenses, you can track the level of lawlessness with the naked eye.

A reader sends this shot of the freshly paved surface of Adams Street, heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge just south of Johnson Street. The parking regulations have switched sides, so it looks like the old curbside bike lane on the right side of the street -- a notorious double-parking zone -- will be shifting over, either all the way to the left curb or between the parking lane and the moving lane. We have a request in with DOT to find out what the plan is.

As the New York Post continues its increasingly tedious assault on pedestrians and crosstown transit riders, its writers always seem to suggest that giving priority to buses in an important retail area is both radical and self-evidently bad for business. If they bothered to look just one borough away, they'd see that nothing could be further from the truth. The eight bus- and pedestrian-only blocks of downtown Brooklyn's Fulton Mall make up the most successful retail strip in the city outside of Manhattan.

If you've ever wished you could dodge more cars and inhale more exhaust on your way to the park, Downtown Brooklyn's next green space is for you. It will be built on top of a garage with nearly 700 underground parking spots.

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, the Department of City Planning is currently studying the merits of parking minimums in some of New York's transit-rich neighborhoods, like Harlem and western Brooklyn and Queens. And local interests in at least one neighborhood, Downtown Brooklyn, are starting to mobilize around the issue. While the coalition has yet to go public, sources say there have been preliminary discussions about reducing, or even eliminating, parking minimums in the area, which would be a big victory for sustainable transportation.