The City Is Jacking Up Parking-Meter Rates Around Here

According to a letter sent by the Department of Transportation to Community Board 1, the city is dramatically raising the rates at parking meters. (The change will affect Manhattan starting in October.) In Tribeca, instead of $3.50 per hour, the rate will be $4 for the first hour and $6.75 for the second hour. (For two hours, then, the new rate is $10.75 rather than $7—a 50% increase.) Below Chambers has a different rate: Instead of $1 per hour, the first hour is $2 and the second hour is $7.50 (!). For two hours of parking, that’s nearly five times higher than it is now.

Of course, first you have to find a metered spot that isn’t taken by a card with a placard, real or fake. If the city really wants to get cars off the street (and increase revenue in the process), it should institute true placard reform. But that’s political death.

N.B. The URL mentioned in the letter is here.

 

6 Comments

  1. The tone seems to convey you think this is a bad thing? Subsidized street parking in a borough where only 23% of residents own cars (and probably even less south of 59th) is a pox on our society.

    • Not to mention that many of those residents illegally register their cars outside Manhattan anyhow and thus would not qualify for any kind of resident parking permit if NYC were to institute such a program like other cities have.

    • Agreed. This is very cheap, after all, for monopolizing a piece of NYC real estate. There is no universal right to cheap, or actually any, on-street parking.

      If it does anything to help reduce traffic congestion, noise, pollution, and the safety hazards incurred by so many incompetent and/or irresponsible drivers, then it sounds like a good thing to me.

  2. Great – another expense bicyclists don’t have to pay and drivers get screwed again. They pay for insurance, inspection, registration and tolls. Now they’re getting robbed by paying more for a meter? Where does the money from the mini meters go? Not to fixing streets and roads. Bicyclists don’t pay for anything. Give the streets back to vehicles and walkers. This is NYC not upstate NY.

    • Lol, are you also upset that it’s expense pedestrians don’t have to pay?
      Leave your 100 sq ft vehicle in a public place, but are upset there’s a fee…

  3. much cheaper than parking garage. hopefully easier to find a space.

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