Parking

Via Norman Oder at Atlantic Yards Report, here's a variety of parking scofflaw that we've never come across before on Streetsblog.

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.

It's too soon in the development of SFPark to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of demand-responsive pricing on parking habits, says the SFMTA's Jay Primus, who manages the SFPark program.

Take a break this weekend from the unrelentingly bleak news about Governor Cuomo's stealth attack on the transit system, and enjoy this time-lapse of the new pop-up café at Local on Sullivan Street. Up until this July, a camera at this location would only have recorded the occasional act of parallel parking and feeding the meter.

The sides are lining up for and against the oversized parking garage that the Rudin family wants to build for its luxury apartments at the former St. Vincent's Hospital site in Greenwich Village. Supporting the request to exceed Manhattan's parking maximums is Borough President Scott Stringer. Opposing it are the community board and the urban planning advocates at the Municipal Art Society. Next month, the City Planning Commission will decide whether to ignore its own guidelines and grant a special permit raising the maximums for the Rudins.

This isn't what transit-oriented development is supposed to look like.

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.

Here they are: the first set of reader-submitted "pedestrian burdens," courtesy of Michael Kodransky, co-author of ITDP's recent report on European parking policy innovations.

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.