[otoburb]

>>"In Chicago, neighborhood parking costs residents $25 a year; in Los Angeles, as much as $34; in Washington, $35; and in Portland, Ore., $75. In Boston, a pass for neighborhood parking is free, but officials are considering charging people with one car $25, and more for second and third cars."

The area highlighted in the article is the Upper West Side in Manhattan, which is a primarily residential area and not a commercial area that will be subject to a 2021 congestion toll. I don't know of any data that tracks the breakdown of outsider vs. resident cars, but generally I feel that the majority of cars who "cruise an average of seven blocks [...] before they find an empty space" will not be impacted much if residential parking permits are issued.

In fact, residential parking permits would probably still result in the same problems mentioned in the article: double-parked vehicles during the day, remnants of a car-centric culture, and residents desperately circling for free parking spots. The one benefit of a parking permit would be an increase in city revenue.

This is sort of addressed in the article where "residential parking fees in other cities have not been a panacea, in part because neighborhood permits usually do not deal with the supply-and-demand problem — too many cars for the number of spaces."

You could force residents to pay for garages which generally charge $700+ per month to store a sedan (more for SUVs), but then we keep hearing how such policies favour the rich and wealthy because they disadvantage residents who need vehicles to drive to work every day.

[rdmond]

Nobody who lives on the Upper West Side is driving to work. They circle looking for spots when they have to move their cars for street cleaning and when the get back Sunday night from their country houses.

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/07/05/new-york-is-really-aw...

[lg]

as an UWSer who does not know anyone with a "country residence" or who can afford a second residence at all given the exorbitant price of living in this city, there are plenty of other reasons for people to take the car out in the middle of the day on a summer weekend like, say, going to a beach with your chairs and cooler etc which isn't something you can do with public transit, or going hiking someplace not right off a train line, or any number of things that ordinary non-super-rich people do.

[rdmond]

Sure, but every time NYC "car culture" questions come up, people start wringing their hands about people who need to drive to work. If we're talking NYC that's a low percentage of people who do drive to work (whether they need to is another question) and for the Upper West Side (say, zipcodes 10023, 10024, 10025) very low, 6%-7%.

http://zipatlas.com/us/ny/zip-code-comparison/percentage-pop...

It is less compelling to say that people need free curbside parking so they can go to the Catskills, whether they have a house there or not.

[lg]

I would certainly support resident parking permits. I don't think many people need to commute into the UWS for work by car, since of course the entire neighborhood is hooked up to transit endpoints that have their own parking, which is not necessarily true for the places that UWSers commute to.

[jinushaun]

Car ownership is prevelant everywhere, not just the "rich" neighborhoods. Come visit Harlem, Inwood, Bronx and Queens.

[rdmond]

Cars are prevalent because they take up a lot of space, but car ownership is not. Not even 25% of people in Manhattan own car. Even in Staten Island 17% of people don't have a car.

https://blog.tstc.org/2017/04/21/car-free-new-york-city/

[crazygringo]

Ideally the city would have to have the courage to assign permits to individual blocks and create permit-only zones that fit the entire number of permits granted, with temporary parking only allowed in a small number of parking spots remaining outside those zones. And it should be hundreds of dollars a year at a minimum -- or even better, auctioned off, which would almost certainly be a thousand or more a year in many neighborhoods.

But nevertheless, increasing city revenue is nothing to sneeze at -- since it will presumably either lower taxes for the rest of us or delay otherwise inevitable increases.

Because the majority of non-car-owning New Yorkers shouldn't be subsidizing residential car owners, which is what happens right now. Car owners should be paying market rate for their parking space, just like I pay market rate for my apartment space.

[Spooky23]

My city (NOT New York City) did residential parking in a couple of areas. It helped eliminate the issue of certain workers in nearby-ish businesses stalking residents.

But, parking still sucks, and it hurt businesses significantly. Probably half of the restaurants in the area that I'm thinking of closed down after the parking change. Although the rules are fairly lenient (2-hour parking is permitted in most places), people just stay away.

Parking sucks because in this city there's no permitting for housing units and no actual way to limit or have costs associated with permits. You just need to prove residency -- so you may be one of 12 tenants in a "two family" building.

[yabadabadoes]

Given how bizarre the US is, I suspect the only option in most cases is to assign the rights to spaces to the adjacent buildings and then use them as a factor in value and therefore local tax.

Once this is done, there's no place to park at virtually everyone's destination and a few people end up paying a lot up front and in tax for multiple spaces while everyone else gives up on cars..

The end result is a much more substantial effective road tax while avoiding all the reasonable compromises.

[Spooky23]

I doubt it.

The big problem here is that you have well-intentioned, intelligent people who are ultimately correct re: cars. Then you have reality, where millions people are dependent on them, and trillions in wealth are based on ready access to cars.

In a democracy, the magic and challenge of governance is balancing the long term needs of society with the current needs of the electorate. For this issue, that means the solutions and the implementation will be messy.