Making New York Parking Easier Just Makes Parking Harder

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Parking on most New York City streets is free, in the sense that they don’t have parking meters and don’t require resident permits. Keeping your car parked full-time on city streets is not really free, though, because you have to move it when the street sweepers come through.

On east-west streets in the borough of Manhattan the resulting alternate-side parking rules generally require that each side of the street be vacated for 90 minutes twice a week. Because there usually aren’t any parking spaces available on the other side of the street while this is happening, many Manhattan car owners spend 90 minutes twice a week sitting in their cars, at first double-parked on the other side of the street and then, after the street sweeper comes through, waiting in their new parking spots until they become legal again.

Car-owning households in Manhattan had a median income of $134,000 as of 2017, so last year I estimated (factoring in the days when the parking rules are suspended due to religious or other holidays) that the average annual cost of this three hours a week of parking duty was $8,581. There are a bunch of reasons that estimate is probably too high: More-affluent people are more likely to pay to park in garages, many people actually get work done while sitting double-parked in their cars, and many have places to go in their cars during the day and thus don’t have to participate. Still, it does seem reasonable to say that the real cost of keeping one’s car parked on a Manhattan street with twice-a-week alternate-side parking restrictions is several thousand dollars a year.

Which brings us to the announcement Tuesday by Mayor Bill de Blasio — a once and presumably future Brooklyn street parker — of what he called “the biggest change in alternate-side parking in the last two decades.” For the rest of the summer, he said, no New Yorker will be forced to move their car for the street sweepers more than once a week. He also voiced the hope that this will be “something we can institute long-term.”

This decision comes on the heels of multiple pandemic-related suspensions of street sweeping and alternate-side parking rules since March, which generally seem to have worked out OK although the streets are now getting pretty scuzzy. From a purely sanitary perspective, the change doesn’t seem unreasonable. Once-a-week sweeping is probably enough for most city residential streets.

But effectively cutting in half the cost of keeping a car parked on the street is clearly going to have some parking-related consequences. If street parking gets cheaper, more people will try to do it — especially as the risk of catching Covid-19 on public transportation drives some carless New Yorkers to reconsider their status. This will make it harder to find a parking place. For full-time street parkers, it may end up being a wash: The added time circling the block will cancel out the reduced time sitting double-parked in the car waiting for the street sweeper. For the building contractors, plumbers, doormen and other service workers who in my neighborhood take up a lot of the spaces on weekdays, it seems like it will just make parking much harder to find. And having even more cars circling around looking for parking than there already are — a 2007 survey found that 28% of those driving in SoHo in Manhattan and 45% in Park Slope in Brooklyn (de Blasio’s old neighborhood) were looking for parking — is bad news for lots of people.

The coronavirus-induced exodus of affluent New Yorkers to houses outside the city has kept parking demand in check during the alternate-side parking suspensions of the past few months, and I imagine things will continue to be manageable through Labor Day. But if the city sticks to once-a-week street-sweeping after that, a worsening parking crunch seems the likeliest result. If fear of germs on public transportation endures, or city and state budget woes force big cutbacks in transit service, that crunch could get pretty apocalyptic over the next couple of years.

De Blasio seemed unconcerned Tuesday about such potential consequences, terming the twice-a-week alternate-side rules a “super hassle,” and seeming to say that he saw changing them as either a “fairness and justice” or “kitchen-table issue,” or maybe both. That’s interesting framing, given that 70% of New York City households live in apartments, few of which have kitchens wide enough to fit a table in, and 55% don’t have cars (in Manhattan 78% don’t). Also, the 45% of New York City households that do have cars have more than twice the median income of those that don’t. By the numbers, free street parking in New York City appears to be an unfair, unjust giveaway to an affluent minority, some of whom have actual kitchen tables.

To be sure, any setup that involves residents paying for parking would seem unfair and unjust to some as well. The current system at least allows for a certain amount of self-sorting by income and tolerance for hassle, as car owners with lots of the former and little of the latter opt to pay $500 or more a month for garage parking, leaving more street spaces for everybody else. A street parking fee high enough to make spaces easy to find would have to be thousands of dollars a year in many Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods, too much for some long-time residents. A lower fee would most likely just replicate current parking hassles. There’s no easy fix. Which goes for de Blasio’s alternate-side rules change, too.

That's the percentage of occupied housing units that were in buildings of three units or more as of 2018.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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