New York is getting a once-in-a-generation opportunity
to use curb space better
So far, New York City has been little more than a passenger on the congestion-pricing train. The policy was ratified in Albany; its tolls were calculated by a state-appointed board; the revenues will plug budget holes at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is controlled by the governor.
And yet as the summer of central business district tolling creeps closer, City Hall has a key role in ensuring that the controversial plan delivers maximum benefits in the toll zone and minimum annoyance beyond it.
Both of those objectives depend on how the City plays its ace in the hole: Control over street space. The City manages 19,000 lane miles and 3 million parking spaces; streets make up an astounding 36% of Manhattan. The unthinking allocation of most of that space to private cars — those in motion, but in particular, those that are parked — has long presented one of the city’s greatest opportunities for improvement.
A once-in-a-generation window will open for City Hall when the tolls take effect later this spring, removing an estimated 100,000 vehicles from Manhattan streets. This represents not just a political opportunity, but a practical one as well: It’s a lot easier to do construction when there aren’t quite so many cars around.
The City should pay particular attention to its parking spaces, which may be the most underpriced asset in the United States. The Adams administration has made encouraging gestures in this direction. Trash containers are occupying some curb spaces while dynamically priced meters (which adjust their price according to how much parking is available) are introduced at others. The administration has pledged to “daylight” 1,000 intersections each year, removing parking near crosswalks to increase pedestrian visibility.
But what Manhattan curbs really need is for the City to make good on the promise of congestion pricing. Namely, by taxing drivers, New York can make it easier for everyone else to get around. That’s not just a matter of raising billions for the MTA, which the policy is required to do. The City has a role to play here too, since much of Manhattan’s transportation challenge comes down to its poor management of street space.
The road to a city that’s less dependent on cars runs through the curb lane. That is where New York must build far more world-class bike and bus lanes, fixing and expanding a network that is incomplete and hampered by illegally parked cars and turning drivers. That will improve the flow of two-wheeled vehicles, cars and buses alike. This is also where, in the pre-automobile days, wider sidewalks once gave New Yorkers ample room to walk. The city doesn’t necessarily need to zap parking spaces, as opposed to moving lanes, to make these changes. But at a bare minimum, it needs to move them.
The road to a city that’s less dependent on cars runs through the curb lane.
That needs to happen quickly, because the sticker shock of congestion pricing will immediately be counterbalanced by a substantially better driving experience in Manhattan. As former DOT chief Janette Sadik-Khan warned in Curbed last year, “If congestion pricing does in fact remove 20% of the traffic and you just wind up with underused car lanes, it’s an invitation for motorists to fill them up again.” It will be easier for the City to create proper bus lanes while parking spaces lie vacant; reliable bus service will, in turn, help make sure transit riders don’t bail on the MTA when they see how fast traffic moves.
Those improvement projects should not stop at the boundaries of the toll zone, but there’s no doubt that parking outside the CBD poses some different challenges. In Upper Manhattan, residents are bracing for an onslaught of commuters, as drivers seek to park their cars on free land north of 60th Street. Other neighborhoods will experience more competition for daytime parking as residents switch to transit. In anticipation of this, city politicians have once again proposed residential parking permits. While there is something un-New York-like about carving out special privileges for locals, whether in the parking lane or at the Met, this has proven to be a popular and pragmatic solution in other parking-challenged cities like Boston and Washington, D.C.
Issue low-cost permits to current car-owning residents, and give them and low-income households an option to renew at that rate in perpetuity. But after that initial period, start charging applicants a market price for a limited number of permits.
Parking permits come with pros and cons. Pro: Permits can bring order to street parking, and provide a forum to crack down on fake plates and out-of-state registrations as well. Con: Permits institutionalize the sense of ownership that a minority of car-owning New Yorkers feel over the city’s public space, and perpetuate the low-value use of public land for the free storage of private property.
The city can resolve that issue by borrowing a technique from Vancouver: Issue low-cost permits to current car-owning residents, and give them and low-income households an option to renew at that rate in perpetuity. But after that initial period, start charging applicants a market price for a limited number of permits. Gradually, old-timers move away and the system transitions into one where street space is appropriately priced, and the city can easily weigh the distribution of new permits against other curb priorities in terms of space and money. It’s hard to take away parking privileges, but it’s easy not to grant them in the first place.
Love it or hate it, the streatery’s moment of glory has permanently recalibrated New Yorkers’ sense of possibility for public space.
Overlook parking and you overlook a crucial ingredient in the transportation paradigm. In its analysis of congestion pricing’s effects, the MTA estimated that the average Manhattan-bound driver paid $30 to park. The congestion pricing expert Charles Komanoff argues in Streetsblog that the actual average parking cost is closer to $15, since so many public sector employees have parking placards and park for free. Why does this matter? Because when using the MTA’s inflated daily parking estimate, the new $15 toll looks like a smaller relative change — a 40% increase in commute cost. In reality, the toll will nearly double what the average driver spends to get to work. Per Komanoff, that means the congestion charge will clear the streets even more than advertised, since it’s the relative change in price that shapes behavior.
And that means it’s past time to get to work. Earlier I wrote this was a once-in-a-generation opportunity, but that’s not quite right. New York City streets were also emptied of cars under less happy circumstances four years ago, and Mayor Bill de Blasio used the occasion to usher in, almost by accident, the single greatest change to the city’s public space in my lifetime in the form of outdoor dining. Love it or hate it, the streatery’s moment of glory has permanently recalibrated New Yorkers’ sense of possibility for public space.
That precedent carries another lesson for our current moment. The outdoor dining program demonstrated that the mayor can make change in a New York minute — without the years of neighborhood therapy sessions that have come to characterize even small-scale road safety projects. Improving the commute for pedestrians, bikes and buses will be a crucial factor in congestion pricing’s success. For every day we wait to dig up the streets, another car will be parked.