Department of City Planning

Staten Island's North Shore is one of the city's great sites of opportunity. The neighborhoods along the Kill Van Kull are twice as dense as the rest of Staten Island, but lack any transit option beyond the bus. There are historic town centers at St. George and Port Richmond, but car-centric planning deadens street life. The waterfront, much of which still hosts a vibrant maritime industry, is only accessible to the public at three locations in six miles.

Evidence continues to mount that New York City's mandatory parking minimums encourage people to drive.

The City Planning Commission approved a Rudin family request to build 50 percent more parking than allowed at the site of the former St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. The commission's unanimous approval came last Monday despite opposition to the parking garage from the local community board and evidence that Rudin hadn't met the city's own requirements for granting exemptions to parking maximums.

When plans to reform parking policies in the Manhattan core leaked out of the Department of City Planning last fall, the documents presented a riddle. The proposed changes were solid reforms to successful policies, closing loopholes in the existing parking caps and rationalizing the current system. The draft study which accompanied the reforms, however, seemed to play fast and loose with the facts while arguing for the city to allow parking to eat up more of Manhattan's valuable space. One hand didn't seem to know what the other was doing, and with New York's powerful real estate industry lobbying against the parking maximums, parking reform was in a precarious position.

At last week’s Transportation 2030 conference, Real Estate Board of New York Senior Vice President Michael Slattery made clear that his industry wants to eliminate one of the bedrock policies of traffic management in the New York City core. As Streetsblog reported last month, REBNY is mobilizing against the parking maximums which have helped to hold Manhattan traffic in check for a generation. Slattery went public with REBNY's vision at Friday's conference, articulating the real estate lobby's belief that fulfilling so-called market demand for more parking spots will aid new construction.

Yesterday, the Department of City Planning asked experts from around the country how to make a more sustainable zoning code. Their response? Scrap parking minimums.

Get your cameras ready, Streetsbloggers. It's time to show Department of City Planning Director Amanda Burden what city-mandated parking garages are doing to the streets in your neighborhood.

The Department of City Planning continues to display an openness to the possibility of tearing down the Sheridan Expressway. A slideshow prepared for a September public meeting, recently posted online, shows how the agency is applying a comprehensive approach to the question of what to do with the lightly-used, Robert Moses-era highway along the Bronx River.

The Department of City Planning continues to send confusing signals about parking policy. Is the department looking to strengthen parking policies that limit traffic, or does it want to water down the rules already in place?