Parking

Flashback to Europe, sixty years ago. Just emerging from the ruin of total war, the continent was in the midst of a nearly unprecedented reconstruction. Over the next decade, industry finally was able to turn toward consumer products, from stockings to refrigerators and, of course, the automobile. Italians owned only 342,000 cars in 1950, but ten years later that number had increased to two million, according to historian Tony Judt. In France, the number of cars tripled over the decade.

After Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca, Speaker Christine Quinn, and the City Council yanked a 25-cent parking meter increase out of the city budget last week, reading Vacca's explanation in the Daily News ("This was just not fair.") was enough to make transportation reformers despair.

Speaker Christine Quinn's office just announced that the City Council has reached a budget deal with the Bloomberg administration, restoring some services slated for cuts and targeting others instead. There's also one case where the council successfully fought to prevent the city from raising revenue to fund more services. A proposal to increase parking meter rates by 25 cents per hour in Manhattan above 86th Street and in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island got negotiated out of the budget deal, thanks in no small part to vigorous opposition from Transportation Committee Chair James Vacca.

The fight for scarce street space is always fierce in New York City, and as DOT's efforts to install bike and bus lanes across the city have revealed, the most contested zone of all is probably the curbside. On commercial streets, drivers can't get enough of the underpriced on-street parking while businesses want curbside access to load and unload deliveries. The result is rampant double-parking, cruising, and ultimately congestion -- slowing down buses and creating more dangerous conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. In some cases, local displeasure about curbside dysfunction manifests itself as opposition to seemingly unrelated livable streets improvements, like the Fifth Avenue bike lane in Park Slope.

Council Member Gale Brewer has struck a deal on the Riverside Center mega-development, sending the 2,500-apartment project through two City Council committees and on a track to final approval. The deal increases the number of parking spaces allowed at Riverside Center to 1,500, far more than the community board or even the City Planning Commission had approved.

Raking in millions by inducing more traffic on Jamaica's congested streets? It's charity, says New York City, and the business that does it should not pay taxes.

The latest round of the knock-down drag-out fight over the Atlantic Yards project is underway, and it's all about parking. At issue is a potential 1,100-space surface parking lot that would be located between Pacific and Dean Streets, just west of Vanderbilt Avenue. That lot has been portrayed as temporary, "interim" parking by the Empire State Development Corporation and project developer Forest City Ratner, but could sit there generating traffic for up to 25 years. Last week several groups filed a motion to halt construction until the environmental impacts of the project are studied more fully.

When Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced that he was striking a deal to privatize his city's 36,000 parking meters, it was a golden opportunity for transportation reform. If all went well, the deal could have cleared a political path for higher peak-hour meter rates, curbing double-parking and congestion-causing cruising.

Even by its own math, the City Planning Commission seems to have approved 430 parking spots too many at Riverside Center, the new development slated to straddle 60th Street on the far West Side.