With congestion pricing looming, a pair of city council members are pushing for residential parking permits, a proposal that has been tried only to fail again and again in New York City.
Car owners in Kew Gardens and upper Manhattan are looking for parking relief in their neighborhoods. Councilwomen Lynn Schulman and Carmen De La Rosa re-introduced the pair of bills last week proposing a residential parking permit system for constituents in their respective districts.
Schulman told the Daily News her proposal was born out of community complaints, mainly the practice of outsiders leaving their cars for the day to hop on the Long Island Rail Road, whose tracks cut through the neighborhood.
“And they park their cars there. They park it in front of people’s homes,” Schulman, who initially proposed the measure while in her first year in office, said in a phone interview. “There are no parking spaces for people who actually live in the community and so this was a way to give them preference.”
Residents are then left with scraps, Schulman said, sometimes circling their blocks for as long as an hour scouring for a spot.
Lynn Schulman and Carlina Rivera
Those same issues plague northern Manhattan, where drivers from New Jersey coming off the George Washington Bridge routinely park their cars in Washington Heights and Inwood, areas that would be subject to the parking system.
“With congestion pricing coming closer and closer every day I know that my community is going to be one of those communities that is going to be impacted by folks who drive into northern Manhattan and because we have that robust network of transit options people are going to park their cars and then take public transportation into the city. And so where does that lead the residents in northern Manhattan?” De La Rosa said.
Under Schulman’s bill, the city Transportation Department would be charged with creating the parking permit system, designating which sections of the neighborhood would require a parking permit, what times and days of the week permitting would be in effect, along with a fee structure.
The bill would also leave 20% of parking spaces available to non-residents and enact 90-minute short-term parking spots in the area, according to the bill. De La Rosa’s bill — which said would require state goverrnment to authorize a program — would cover neighborhoods between 60th Street to the tip of Inwood.
While a push to create a residential parking program has gained some popularity, with Brooklyn Councilwoman Crystal Hudson re-introducing a permitting system for a section of her district last month, seeing an actual program get off its feet has dogged lawmakers for decades.
This includes an attempt made as far back as 1998 when Councilmembers proposed a resolution formally calling on the state to create such a system. The resolution went nowhere.
Numerous resolutions for resident parking have been introduced over the years, including 2008 by then-Councilwoman Letitia James for a section of Brooklyn and 2017 by then-Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley for the Queens neighborhood of Woodside.
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State lawmakers have tried to introduced a residential parking system as recently as last year with the state Senate proposing plan in its proposed budget response. The new revenue stream would have gone to fund the MTA, a proposal similar to the long-awaited congestion pricing plan. The plan was not included in the final budget.
During testimony in 2018 on the bills, city DOT officials were skeptical whether the city had legal authority to create a program, saying it’s up to the state to make that call. They also argued that such a system would create inequity among drivers who can “store their cars in the program area, often one with good access to transit, while restricting the ability of others to park in the area.”
As New York decides whether the creation of parking system is left to state or local legislators, such programs have already been implemented in Boston, London and Paris.
“It’s past due time for New York City to try this out,” De La Rosa said.
