Free parking, it turns out, isn't free. A new study by transportation guru Bruce Schaller finds that free parking in Manhattan's Central Business district is responsible for a significant amount of New York City's staggering traffic congestion. Schaller's new study, Congested Streets: The Skewed Economic Incentives to Drive Into Manhattan (PDF), finds that free parking and improperly priced on-street parking imposes enormous costs on the city as a whole. Forget that political hot potato, congestion pricing. Mayor Bloomberg could, essentially, revamp New York City transportation policy (and meet some of his Long-Term Sustainability goals in the process) simply by making changes in the way New York City's manages and prices its parking supply.
Last year, Schaller's groundbreaking study, Necessity or Choice: Why People Drive in Manhattan (PDF) found that a whopping 80 percent of the motorists driving into Manhattan's Central Business District have viable transit options. The study released today builds on those findings and begins to answer the question: Why do people choose to drive into Manhattan rather than using transit?
One of the answers to this question, it turns out, is that lots of people have access to free parking and on-street parking priced far below market rates.
To conduct his most recent study, Schaller sent out a number of friendly, attractive, young people (OK... young women) to intercept and interview motorists about where they were driving, where they parked and how much it had cost. Stationed at strategic locations throughout the Manhattan Central Business District, the interviewers gathered viable surveys from 1,612 drivers.
Schaller crunched the numbers and here is what he found (the first stat is a real head turner):
57 percent of Manhattan Central Business District drivers don't pay anything for parking!!!
38 percent of motorists parking in the CBD have free parking provided to them.
An additional 19 percent of motorists park for free at un-metered on-street spaces.
Transportation Alternatives' sums up the findings as follows:
The cost and availability of parking is the biggest factor influencing potential motorists' choice between driving and public transportation, and that free parking encourages driving and exacerbates Manhattan's traffic problem. "The City's current traffic policy has failed because the large majority of CBD drivers do not pay for parking," Schaller says. "These perverse economic incentives that encourage driving need to be fixed with new City policies recommended in this report."
Schaller and T.A. recommend that the City do five things to eliminate these "perverse incentives:"
Restrict the availability and use of government-issued parking placards
Rationalize the price of on-street meter parking and increase the number of metered spaces
Encourage private companies to reduce employer provided parking
Provide incentives to employers with a parking "cash-out"
AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.
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