Parking

New York City is moving forward with plans to use sensors to improve parking management, along the lines of San Francisco's pioneering SFPark system. The program will be unveiled next year, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced at a conference on transportation and technology held last Friday at Columbia University.

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?

What appears to be an internal rift within the Department of City Planning could disrupt attempts to reform the city's parking policies for the Manhattan core, in the face of opposition from the powerful real estate industry.

A generation ago, every new building in New York City had to include parking. Even in downtown and midtown Manhattan, the law required developers to build parking spaces for 40 percent of all new residences. The most walkable, transit-accessible districts in the country had mandates to set aside space for car storage.

In last winter's Chicago mayoral election, all the leading candidates made ambitious promises to increase funding for the city's struggling transit agency. Now, with a proposed $2 "congestion fee" -- really a downtown surcharge on the city's parking tax -- Emanuel plans to make drivers pay their fair share and use the proceeds to build a new rail station and the city's first bus rapid transit line.

Leaders in New York City's public housing community are interested in transforming city-owned superblocks into mixed-use, mixed-income communities that engage with the pedestrian realm. There are of course many obstacles to this kind of ambitious project, but only one was identified specifically in a Municipal Art Society panel on the topic last Friday: the city's own parking requirements.

Last year, due to protracted financial difficulties, St. Vincent's in Greenwich Village closed its doors after 150 years, one-and-a-half centuries that saw the hospital play a major role treating victims of the AIDS crisis and the 9/11 attacks. Though many in the neighborhood hoped to see a full-service hospital remain in the Village, a plan eventually emerged to turn the landmark O'Toole building west of Seventh Avenue into an emergency room and outpatient surgery center, while the hospital buildings east of Seventh would be sold to the Rudin family and redeveloped as luxury apartments.

Last week Streetsblog LA talked with UCLA Professor and parking guru Donald Shoup about ExpressPark, the new parking pricing system coming to downtown Los Angeles.

New York City drivers will soon be able to pay the parking meter using their cell phones, a technological advance common in European cities and spreading quickly across the United States. A year-long, 300-space pilot will roll out this spring with the possibility of a more widespread implementation after that. It remains to be seen, however, whether the city will treat pay-by-phone as a standalone convenience for drivers or as one piece of a comprehensive rethinking of parking policy, pricing, payment and enforcement.