Parking

Looks like Assembly member Joan Millman's efforts to keep the Henry Street bike lane clear of cars belonging to church-going motorists yielded only a Pyrrhic, pre-primary day victory.

If you've ever wished you could dodge more cars and inhale more exhaust on your way to the park, Downtown Brooklyn's next green space is for you. It will be built on top of a garage with nearly 700 underground parking spots.

A hearing on the Riverside Center mega-development yesterday revealed a popular hunger for a more walkable West Side and perhaps some interest from the City Planning Commission in the same. Extell Development is looking to build a housing and retail complex, including 1,800 parking spaces, on this waterfront site equivalent in size to two Manhattan blocks. Public testimony called for a slew of urban design improvements to their plan, including reducing the amount of off-street parking, integrating the site with the surrounding streetscape, and working towards burying the elevated Miller Highway.

Last week we published a reply from UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup to Cato Institute senior fellow Randal O'Toole, in which Shoup clarified his positions on parking policy and explained several ways in which government regulations favor the provision of free parking. In response, O'Toole ran this post on the Cato@Liberty blog. Streetsblog is pleased to publish Shoup's follow-up, which suggests Cato estimate the price distortions that give incentives for the libertarian think tank's employees to commute by car. By doing so, Cato headquarters could serve as a laboratory for leveling the commute subsidy playing field, an idea embedded in Oregon Congressman Earl Blumenauer's Green Routes to Work Act.

According to a report in DNAinfo, Community Board 7 on the Upper West Side is taking the rare step of asking the city to end the giveaway of free curbside parking. The community board approved a resolution calling for paid Sunday parking in its meeting last night by a vote of 21 to 12, with five abstentions, DNAinfo’s Leslie Albrecht reports.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer released his recommendations for the Riverside Center megaproject yesterday afternoon. Like Community Board 7, he doesn't approve of Extell Development's request to build more than 1,800 underground parking spaces and an automobile showroom and repair shop. He does believe, however, that 1,100 parking spots would be appropriate.

We're reprinting this reply [PDF] from UCLA professor Donald Shoup, author of the High Cost of Free Parking, to Randal O'Toole, the libertarian Cato Institute senior fellow who refuses to acknowledge the role of massive government intervention in the market for parking, and the effect this has had on America's car dependence. It's an excellent guide to the misdirection, mistakes, logical fallacies, and falsehoods that form the foundation of O'Toole's arguments.

We wrote yesterday about the expansion of the Park Smart pilot in Park Slope, but that's not the only neighborhood where the program is on the move. As of June, the Upper East Side became the third neighborhood to gain a Park Smart pilot [PDF]. Like a lot of things on the Upper East Side, peak hour on-street parking there is now the most expensive in the city. 

They call it No-Park Slope for a reason: At many times of day, motorists looking for a legit spot in this Brooklyn neighborhood wind up cruising the streets endlessly in frustration. Because on-street parking spaces are some of the cheapest real estate in the city, drivers snap up the bargain and create parking shortages, leading to excess traffic and double-parking. In the end, everyone pays for the cheap price of parking: motorists who lose time, pedestrians and cyclists endangered by excessive traffic and double-parking, and bus riders delayed by congestion. Now it looks like there's some relief in sight.