This city seems to come up with one more stupid idea after another. The very latest is to get rid of the parking in NYC.
Per parking spot, the city would lose a total of around $25,000 per year from the elimination of the spot – multiply that by, let’s say, 1,200 parking spots, and that’s a total of almost $30 million lost per year. This is only a rough estimate.
Since people cannot afford to live in the city anymore, workmen and service-workers have to drive into the city to bring their equipment to repair your toilet or sink (to say nothing of painters, carpenters, electricians, etc.) If the city eliminates parking, what will they do?
The problem is also how the cars are parked. Right now there is parallel parking in the bus lane. Everything possible is wrong with this plan. Before Mr. Bloomberg gave those spaces away, there was public parking. By making it impossible to come into Manhattan and park, the problem is being exacerbated.
Buses should be less than half the size that they are, and they should run down the center lane – the way the trolleys used to go. If they are small and stay in the center lane, they would not block traffic to the extent that they do. The city should implement more pedestrian islands in the middle of streets for people to get on and off buses, which would leave the curbs free so traffic can move more freely and people can go to stores and get in and out of taxis.
The first thing that the city needs to do is to create nose-in curb parking on one side of the street only instead of parallel parking, which is ridiculous. Certain streets should be designated as nose-in parking streets, and certain streets should be designated as cross-town streets with no parking. Heavily trafficked cross-town streets should not have public parking. Perhaps on every other street, one side of the street should have nose-in parking. If the angle of the parking is acute enough, it takes up barely more space than parallel parking, but creates double the number of spaces. The city could actually make more money by having nose-in parking.
Of course it is also obvious that any new building should be forced to dedicate a certain number of floors to public garage space in return for the right to build. This would be an additional price to the contractors who now are the only winners in the building of these tall, empty skyscrapers, which are a blight on the city.
Handled properly, the city could make more money from parking while still serving the public.