The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald C. Shoup

“This community has households with up to 3 or 4 cars and we are in desperate need of parking,” reads one request from Brooklyn’s CB15, which includes Sheepshead Bay and Gerritsen Beach. Parking problems were also identified as a quality-of-life issue by two dozen of the city’s Community Boards in their annual budget requests for the last fiscal year, with a number of boards seeking funds for new parking facilities-including nine requests for more NYPD precinct parking, and another from Manhattan’s CB4 for a garage to house charter and tour buses.

Whatever monetary savings drivers get from free street parking, they pay for it with their time: A 2017 study found that New York’s drivers spend 107 hours a year searching for a spot, the most of the 10 cities it analyzed.

“You are causing more congestion, you are adding to the emissions, you’re taking up valuable space in a city that doesn’t have a lot of space, and that needs to be priced,” she says. While about 85,000 of the city’s parking spots in commercial areas require drivers to feed the meter, a much larger number-about 97 percent of the city’s on-street parking spaces, experts say -are free, a fact that Jemilah Magnusson, communications director at the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy, calls “fairly ridiculous” considering the cost of land and availability of other transit options in New York.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald C. Shoup