July 10, 2008
City to Test Peak Rates for Parking Meters
By WILLIAM NEUMAN

Call it congestion parking.

In what amounts to congestion pricing for parking spaces, parking meter rates would double during heavy traffic periods in portions of Manhattan and Brooklyn as part of an experimental city program beginning this fall, officials said Wednesday.

The program's goal is to increase turnover in curbside parking spaces in the test areas - a section of Greenwich Village in Manhattan and a stretch of Kings Highway and adjacent streets in the Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn - so that drivers will spend less time cruising in search of an open space, according to the transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan.

Cutting down on cruising will in turn decrease pollution and traffic congestion. It is also expected to decrease the number of drivers who double-park or park in bus stops.

"We've picked corridors that have a lot of congestion and a lot of cruising," Ms. Sadik-Khan said. "Dealing with the cruising and congestion problem we think will improve both mobility in the neighborhood and reduce pollution, and improve the quality of life also in those areas."

If successful, the program could be expanded, she said. The pilot programs are expected to begin in October and will last six months.

In the Village, the higher parking rates would be charged in an area that stretches from Houston Street to Charles Street and includes portions of Seventh Avenue South and Avenue of the Americas. Currently, the area has parking meters that charge 25 cents for 15 minutes, or $1 an hour. Ms. Sadik-Khan said the meter rates would likely increase so that 25 cents would buy 6 to 7 1/2 minutes, which would be the equivalent of $2 to $2.50 an hour.

city beat
Live Stop, Dead Cars

City lots are filling up with seized vehicles.

by Daryl Gale

If you're one of the nearly 31,000 Philadelphians whose car was confiscated under the city's Live Stop program, you're probably already familiar with the contents of this story and have started cursing under your breath while reading it on public transportation. For many others, some questions remain: Whose car gets taken? How do you get it back? And what ever happened to the promise that auto-insurance premiums would drop, since not even a penny has been deducted so far?

Here are the hard numbers. Between last July, when the administration started enforcing Live Stop, and the end of May, 30, 909 cars had been confiscated from drivers without a valid license and/or an up-to-date registration. The program is administered by the Philadelphia Parking Authority, which hauls away the cars and stores them in five lots across the city.

There they wait for owners to reclaim them after paying the necessary fees and acquiring the proper paperwork. That means you have to pay up any tickets and fines, the state's $36 vehicle registration fee, and of course, get some insurance. If no one stakes their claim, the car is auctioned off to the highest bidder. Parking Authority spokesperson Richard Dickson says confiscated cars go to the highest bidder in about a month, which officials consider enough time for owners to get their paperwork in order.

IN 2002, when the car-sharing company known as Zipcar brought its first 10 small Volkswagens to the city, an article in the Automobiles section of The New York Times offered the speculation that the venture's cars might one day "become as familiar to New Yorkers as the pushcart hot dog vendor."

More than five years on, that prediction is closer to being true. The company has 1,100 vehicles in the city, which can be picked up at more than 100 different sites.

But as the company grows, it has bumped into a problem facing so many New Yorkers: scarce and expensive parking. Zipcar says it raised rental rates last month in part because of this cost, and as the company expands further outside Manhattan, it finds itself struggling to stay a step ahead of the developers who are buying up the city's empty lots.

EVEN on a quiet evening last week, without a construction worker in sight, there were signs of the neighborhood strife that has taken over a stretch of 70th Street in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. A blue tarpaulin was draped over an unfinished porch renovation, and in front of that house, behind barriers and yellow tape, was a smooth, pale new stretch of sidewalk, sloping gently down toward the street.

This, in regulatory parlance, was a curb cut, and it was the focus of a dispute that has pitted neighbor against neighbor on a quiet stretch of narrow attached brick houses for the past year.

Gus Englezos, the owner of the house and the author of the curb cut, says he spent $60,000 fighting for permission to build a driveway and free himself from searching for parking spaces on the street.

But in the opinion of the block association president, Josephine Beckmann, who is also the district manager of the local community board, the streetscape has been marred, not to mention the fact that there is now one fewer public parking spot. And the Dyker Heights Civic Association says the city's decision in Mr. Englezos' favor, which it is appealing, could set a pernicious precedent and lead to similar turmoil on dozens of other blocks.

PARKING spaces on the Upper West Side are precious resources, to be hoarded like coal in wartime. The familiar street-cleaning shuffle requires paramilitary levels of vigilance and guile. So it is no surprise that the city is eyeing the neighborhood as a place to test a new program that would raise and lower the price of parking to match demand.

The system, known as performance-based pricing, was pioneered by Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at University of California, Los Angeles. Under the system, which is in use in Pasadena, Calif. and part of Washington, D.C., the price of parking fluctuates over the course of the day.

In peak periods, like the early evening, prices are kept high enough to dissuade some drivers from parking, with the goal of having two spots per block unoccupied at any time. Advocates of the system say it eases congestion and lowers emissions by sparing drivers the usual "cruise" in search of parking.

Over the last year, officials of the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District have told the city they are willing to try out the new system, in return for street improvements like bike racks, benches, curb extensions and bike lanes. The city never formally agreed to such an arrangement, but Barbara Adler, executive director of the business district, said she learned a few weeks ago that performance-based pricing might be in the works for the avenue.

Red lights mean green for GOP

By BOB WARNER
Philadelphia Daily News

warnerb@phillynews.com 215-854-5885

Backers of the red-light program say the main beneficiary has been public safety.

"Incidents of death, injury and property damage are dramatically down at the intersections where cameras are installed," the Parking Authority's board chairman, Joseph T. Ashdale, said in a news release last month.

Other beneficiaries include Republican Party officials and their kin.

Like the explosive growth in the Parking Authority's staff and salaries, reported last year by the Daily News, the red-light-camera program has created more jobs for Republican ward leaders, committeemen and their families.

It has also led to thousands of dollars in campaign contributions for GOP organizations and candidates.

More than anyone else, the contributions have flowed to state Rep. John Perzel, the Northeast Philadelphia Republican who engineered a GOP takeover of the Parking Authority in mid-2001.

It's official: There really is nowhere to park in Lower Manhattan.

A long-awaited city study has found that the area is so choked with vehicles using government-issued parking placards that there is little if any room for those without placards - in other words, most drivers - to park.

In the financial district alone, the study found that on a typical workday, there were three times as many cars without placards trying to park as there were on-street spaces for them.

Over all in Lower Manhattan, the number of private vehicles exceeded the legal spaces by almost 30 percent, and many drivers, bypassing costly garages, were taking their chances by parking illegally. The study was released Friday by the city's Transportation Department.

...

"It's one of the worst neighborhoods you could park in," said Mike Singh, 52, a contractor from Queens who parked his sport utility vehicle on Friday by a fire hydrant near Hudson and Harrison Streets in TriBeCa. "It's beyond everything. You're going all over, looking, and you see nothing."

Mr. Singh said he often parks illegally and pays someone to sit in his truck all day and to move it if a parking agent appears.

 NYC Car Commuters Are Wealthier and Cops All Drive to Work

Motorists are "twice as likely as other congestion zone commuters to hold government jobs" -- 19.5 percent versus 10.3 percent. About a quarter of these government motor vehicle users work in the police or fire departments. "Indeed, very few congestion zone commuters in these occupations took other forms of transportation," according to IBO. Educators represented another one-fourth of government employee car commuters, "although many other educators used alternative transportation."

AFTER WORLD WAR II, the city of Los Angeles figured it would be a swell idea to provide incentives to the local tire industry by dismantling what was then among the most comprehensive and enthusiastically used light-rail systems in the nation. What's good for business is good for the city, the tire companies said on their way to the bank, before the city paved over or shut down every passenger-train track from Mount Lowe above Pasadena, to Long Beach, to Santa Monica - wiping out the popular Red Car rail line.

While keeping the city's poky bus system, Los Angeles leaders of yore took away what planners would call "transportation alternatives."

Or so the urban legend goes, a much-told but probably untrue tale about the Orwellian strategy of using free-market lingo - "good for business" - to restrict consumer choice and shutter the Red Cars. Sy Adler, professor of urban studies at Portland State University, has since shown that the deal wasn't so Orwellian: The Red Cars were abandoned after Angelenos took to their autos with such vigor that the rails lost riders.

But now, the sort of social engineers Orwell envisioned actually are in residence at City Hall as commuters piddle to work in cars. The worst traffic is probably on the Westside, where things move at about 3 mph during rush hour, in a sector of L.A. that lacks a subway and suffers from infamously slow bus service.

Perhaps taking inspiration from the old Red Car legend, the city's Planning Department is using free-market lingo to restrict consumer choices. The bureaucrats' aim: to get Angelenos out of their cars and onto a troubled, skeletal mass-transit system that's a pale reminder of past Red Car glory.

Under this scheme, veteran city planner Thomas Rothmann is pushing to restrict parking, even at condos and apartments. He hopes to render your car so burdensome, and your life around it so miserable, that for relief you'll use the frequent and efficient buses or subways - neither of which will actually exist in most corners of L.A. for 20 to 30 years even under best-case scenarios.

The city's euphemism for all this is "pedestrian friendly."

When Parallel Parking
Was New and Meters
Seemed Un-American
July 30, 2007; Page B1

Parking on city streets today is a cinch compared with the 1930s, when free, unlimited parking was considered every American's constitutional right.

Just as their grandparents had tied their horses to the general store's rail, American drivers expected handy curb space for their cars when they went to town. By the 1930s, however, there were too many cars and too few curbs.

The result was chaos. Employees of downtown businesses hogged spaces for whole days; some merchants deliberately parked their cars in front of competitors' stores. Other drivers circled the narrow streets waiting for a rare free space. Trucks loading or unloading double-parked. In most cities, there were no marks on curbs to delineate spaces. In the few timed spaces, enforcement by chalking the tires was easy to beat. And the art of parallel parking was in its infancy.

"None of our cities were designed for motor traffic, and only in the West were they young enough when the automobile arrived en masse to adapt themselves to the new traffic medium," wrote Arthur Pound in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1938.

For drivers, downtown bottlenecks were maddening, but for retail businesses that depended on customer turnover, they were ruinous. Some large cities tried banning all parking on a few major thoroughfares, but many shoppers wouldn't walk even a few blocks from their car to a store. They took their business to the periphery of the city.

In 1932, the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce decided it had to do something about the city's downtown parking problem. A local newspaper editor, Carl Magee, was charged with finding a solution. Mr. Magee invented the park-o-meter.

On November 16th, 2005, REBAR opened eyes worldwide by transforming a metered parking spot into a park. Locating a site that was underserved by public outdoor space, we installed a small, temporary park that provided nature, seating, and shade. By our calculations, we provided 24,000 square-foot-minutes of public open space that afternoon. See the video!

Since the initial PARK(ing) project was created we've been contacted by people worldwide. What began as a simple, playful idea has become a lively and visible symbol of the desire to reprogram the street and increase public open space in cities all over the planet.

In 2006, with support from The Trust for Public Land, we built upon this groundswell of interest and created an international event. PARK(ing) Day 2006 brought artists, designers, and activists together to create 47 PARKs in 13 Cities worldwide, including New York, London, and Rio de Janeiro. See our PARK(ing) Day 2006 page and the video!

In 2007, we will show how our temporary PARKs can become permanent new urban places and connect people with ways to transform their entire city's streetscape for a sustainable future.

In Houston, $225,000 will buy a three-bedroom house with a game room, den, in-ground pool and hot tub.

In Manhattan, it will buy a parking space. No windows, no view. No walls.

While real estate in much of the country languishes, property in Manhattan continues to escalate in price, and that includes parking spaces. Some buyers do not even own cars, but grab the spaces as investments, renting them out to cover their costs.

Spaces are in such demand that there are waiting lists of buyers. Eight people are hoping for the chance to buy one of five private parking spaces for $225,000 in the basement of 246 West 17th Street, a 34-unit condo development scheduled for completion next January. The developer, meanwhile, is seeking city approval to add four more spots.

Parking in new developments is selling for twice what it was five years ago, said Jonathan Miller, an appraiser and president of Miller Samuel.

Although spaces in prime sections of Manhattan are the most expensive, even those in open lots and in garages in Brooklyn, Queens, Riverdale and Harlem are close to $50,000, although at least one new Brooklyn development is asking $125,000.

City Infrastructure Technologies
About Streetline

Streetline builds solutions to longstanding problems in city management and operations, through the customized design and application of new sensing technologies. Our parking management system offers cities the first real control and oversight of their complex inventory of on- and off-street spaces, and forms the backbone for other innovative sensing solutions that lower city costs and improve public services.

Streetline is located in San Francisco, California.

By Danny Hakim

New York City could start charging residents to park in their own neighborhoods under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's congestion pricing plan. The mayor's proposal, which was introduced in the State Senate this month, would charge most drivers $8 to enter Manhattan below 86th Street on weekdays. To mollify people just outside the zone who feared their streets would turn into parking lots, the Senate bill would allow the city to issue permits so that most parking spots would be restricted to neighborhood residents.

But the bill says there would be unspecified fees that residents would have to pay to get those permits. The money would go to the city's general fund.

John Gallagher, a spokesman for the mayor, said "discussion of a fee structure for residential permit parking is very premature." Among other details of the plan, visitors coming into the city could deduct the cost of bridge and tunnel tolls from an $8 fee to enter Manhattan, but only if they use E-ZPass. And the state's environmental review process would be waived to speed up the plan.

We took a dive into the fine print of the mayor's proposal. As one might expect with such a voluminous piece of legislation, a number of notable items emerge from the fine print.

It's not spelled out how visitors driving into New York City would be made aware that they had to pay $8 within 48 hours or face a $115 fine. The mayor and his administration have said most people would likely have heard about the congestion fee, though some lawmakers say many might not. The mayor's staff says there would also be adequate signage. Lawmakers have wondered how this would actually work: The signs, presumably, would have to explain how and where to pay, requiring a lot more words than "toll ahead."

Parking, that most coveted urban commodity, has turned a typically serene corner of the Bronx into a battleground.

It started after a bus depot opened in 2005 on Stillwell Avenue for the Logan Bus Company of Ozone Park, Queens. The company, which has a contract with the city's Department of Education to transport schoolchildren, operates more than 100 buses from the Bronx location.

By DONALD SHOUP
Published: March 29, 2007

Los Angeles

MOST people view traffic with a mixture of rage and resignation: rage because congestion wastes valuable time, resignation because, well, what can anyone do about it? People have places to go, after all; congestion seems inevitable.

But a surprising amount of traffic isn't caused by people who are on their way somewhere. Rather, it is caused by those who have already arrived. Streets are clogged, in part, by drivers searching for a place to park.

Several studies have found that cruising for curb parking generates about 30 percent of the traffic in central business districts. In a recent survey conducted by Bruce Schaller in the SoHo district in Manhattan, 28 percent of drivers interviewed while they were stopped at traffic lights said they were searching for curb parking. A similar study conducted by Transportation Alternatives in the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn found that 45 percent of drivers were cruising.

BY ANNIE KARNI - Special to the Sun
February 27, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/49401

Almost half of the cars clogging Park Slope's main commercial arteries are driving in circles in search of parking, a new traffic study from a transportation advocacy group shows.

While vehicles competing for parking spaces account for only 28% of street traffic on some of Manhattan's most congested streets, 45% of drivers on the road in this primarily residential Brooklyn neighborhood are searching for curbside parking, according to the study, which Transportation Alternatives will release today.

A lack of parking options translates into lost business, as potential customers grow frustrated circling the block and eventually take their business to other neighborhoods, the study shows. About 15% of parked cars are also illegally stationed in front of fire hydrants, no-standing zones, and ambulance lanes near hospitals.

Beijing lacks 400,000 parking spaces, Zhao Fengtong, vice mayor of the Beijing Municipal government, said on Thursday.
With car ownership rocketing to the current figure of more than two million cars, not to mention more than 300,000 more cars annually, Beijing is struggling to keep up.
Besides building more underground parking lots and parking buildings, Beijing should create an internet parking information system showing all the available public parking spaces, suggested Li Xun, deputy director of China Academy of Urban Planning and Design.
Beijing announced earlier last year that 26 free or low-cost large-scale parking lots will be built near subway and bus stops to encourage drivers to use public transport in downtown Beijing.
Traffic problems topped this year's list of suggestions from representatives of the municipal people's congress. Traffic has been the number one issue for the last five years, said officials of the municipal people's congress.

Letter to the Editor
Peter Gordon. American Planning Association.
Journal of the American Planning Association.
Chicago: Spring 2006.Vol.72, Iss. 2; pg. 244, 1 pgs

... 

...Most American suburbs do devote vast areas of land to free parking. Minimum parking requirements have created an accidental land reserve for housing right where we need it most. If cities reduce or remove the off-street parking requirements in their zoning ordinances, owners of shopping malls and office parks will probably find that some of their land makes a far more valuable site for housing than for parking. Building apartments and condominiums on underused parking lots at suburban employment centers, for example, will allow offices and housing to share parking, increase the housing supply, reduce housing prices, and provide real jobs-housing balance. Providing housing close to jobs will also reduce vehicle travel, energy use, traffic congestion, and air pollution. Converting free parking spaces into valuable housing sites can contribute to solving multiple urban problems for many years to come. But first cities must reduce or remove off-street parking requirements in their zoning codes.

AT 8:30 on a recent morning, a line of cars snaked into the J & L Parking lot on Pacific Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. There to greet them, as always, was the lot's manager, John Trombino, a substantial figure with a jet-black mane.

Like many lots, J & L accommodates "dailies" - commuters who arrive and depart at rush hour - and "monthlies," locals who generally use their cars only in the evenings or on weekends. The dailies occupy the inner two rows of the lot, firmly blocking in the two outer rows of monthlies.

In an ideal world these two tribes would coexist without intervention, but this being New York, emergencies arise: monthlies need to leave in the middle of the day; dailies stay later than planned. Further complicating matters, Mr. Trombino heads off for the day at 10 a.m. to help his father in another lot nearby. Fortunately, this is where the gift of his automotive choreography comes into play.

Raleigh may ease parking spot rule
One space per unit of housing may go

 Josh Shaffer, Staff Writer
RALEIGH - Anyone who has ever circled Nash Square trying to pay a water bill or steered the wrong way down Wilmington Street trying to grab a quick sandwich knows that parking in downtown Raleigh could frustrate a champion maze-running rat.

Downtown offers 42,000 spaces -- more than one apiece for every worker -- but the daily visitor still thinks it's a chore.

"I get customers who come in here and complain," said Danny Nesrallah, who owns America's Pita and Grill. "I've got friends who can't even come down here and see me because there's no place to park."

Raleigh, though, would like to relax its parking rules. The City Council today will consider scrapping the rules that require developers to create one spot per residential unit they build. New offices could get a break, too.

UCLA Professor of Urban Planning Donald Shoup has focused his research on public finance, transportation, and the land market. He has extensively studied the issue of parking as a key link between transportation and land use.In this interview with TPR, the professor talks about his latest book, The High cost of Free Parking, which documents the negative effects of free parking on city form. More information about the book is available at http://www.planning.org/bookservice/highcost.htm.

NATIONAL PERSPECTIVES; No Parking: Condos Leave Out Cars
By LINDA BAKER
Published: November 12, 2006

ANNEMIEKE CLARK and her boyfriend, Daniel Pasley, do not spend a lot of time driving. Ms. Clark, a 29-year-old nursing student at Oregon Health and Science University, takes the bus to school. Her boyfriend is a ''crazy bike rider,'' she said.

So when they decided to buy their first home last winter, they chose a one-bedroom unit in the Civic, one of the first new developments in Portland to market condominiums without parking spaces.

Ms. Clark said they bought the $175,000 condo, which will be ready next summer, because ''it was absolutely the cheapest one selling.'' Mr. Pasley also hoped a unit without parking would inspire Ms. Clark to sell her 1992 Subaru.

''So, part of it was idealism -- that we would get rid of the car,'' Ms. Clark said.

Although condominiums without parking are common in Manhattan and the downtowns of a few other East Coast cities, they are the exception to the rule in most of the country. In fact, almost all local governments require developers to provide a minimum number of parking spaces for each unit -- and to fold the cost of the space into the housing price.

August 12, 2006
Same Problem, Different Stations
By VINCENT M. MALLOZZI
AT 8:30 on a recent morning in West Windsor, N.J., Ken Anderson was sitting behind the wheel of his car, waiting patiently for a train to pull into the Princeton Junction station from New York.
He was not picking anyone up. In what has become part of his daily hourlong commute into Manhattan, Mr. Anderson was staking out reverse commuters so he could grab a parking spot.
‘‘There’s usually one or two people who get off the train and into their cars, and when one of their spots opens up, I make my move,” said Mr. Anderson, 34, of Hightstown, N.J., who works as an accounts payable supervisor at Atari. “To have any chance for a parking spot, you have to get here before 6:30 in the morning or after 8. For me, parking every day is an adventure.”
.... 

Day to Day, July 14, 2006 · A new service will allow drivers to auction off information about when they will leave their parking spaces to other drivers looking for a spot to park. The online forum will also let people auction off their driveways. Andrew Rollert, CEO of SpotScout, the company that will connect drivers through mobile devices, talks with Madeleine Brand.

If you have web access on your mobile phone you can use our mobile application to find a parking spot on the move.