Parking

Since January, Upper Manhattan has been abuzz with news of a proposed development that could bring four new residential towers to Washington Heights. And according to developers Quadriad Realty Partners, there'll be ample parking to go along with them.

Car-free households broken down by Assembly district. Red areas indicate where car ownership has gone up, blue areas where it has decreased. Click on each district for more information.

Well, this doesn't make up for the eminent domain abuse, inexcusable subsidies-slash-dealmaking, crappy urban design and extensive surface parking acreage, but the Wall Street Journal's Jason Gay reminds us that the Brooklyn basketball arena financed by Bruce Ratner, Mikhail Prokhorov, and the taxpayers of New York State will include 400 bike parking spaces.

Last Thursday evening, Manhattan Community Board 2 voted down five of six approved pop-up cafés in their neighborhood, choosing parking spaces over public seating.

DOT presented plans for two Long Island City street redesigns to Queens Community Board 2's transportation committee last night. One, a standard road diet, would calm traffic on 44th Drive by replacing one moving lane in each direction with a painted median and left turn bays [PDF]. The other, a novel design for a single block of 48th Avenue, manages to make four of six lanes into on-street parking [PDF].

When DOT installed its first "pop-up café" over a few parking spaces on Lower Manhattan's Pearl Street last summer, the 14-table public seating area helped increase business by 14 percent at its two sponsoring restaurants. With New York City still recovering from recession and much of the city starved for public space, DOT has moved to expand the program. Restaurants were given the option of requesting a café and DOT selected twelve locations from that pool of applicants. The selected locations are concentrated in the Village and SoHo, making tonight's Community Board 2 vote a critical moment for the program.

Today's New York Post story about City Council Member David Greenfield's desperate push to squeeze a few more parking spaces out of New York City curb space reminded us of this neat little chart, which shows the total number of parking meters in the city, broken out into single-space meters and muni-meters. If Greenfield and other council members want to get serious about opening up curb space, they need to take a hard look at these numbers.

As the operator of the taxpayer-financed Yankee Stadium parking garages heads toward default, there's no longer any question that providing so much parking in such a transit-rich location was a mistake on the scale of Carl Pavano's contract. The decision to give up $2.5 million in city taxes and $5 million in state revenue has proven a poor investment indeed. The question, at this point, is what comes next.

New York City is moving forward with possible plans to privatize its on-street parking to some degree. An RFP released last week by the city's Economic Development Corporation asks investment banks to submit their best ideas for privatizing city assets. Parking tops the list of assets the city is interested in contracting with the private sector over. (Large pieces of transportation infrastructure are also on the list).