BIKE SNOB’S LAST WORD
Waste of Space
In case you haven’t noticed, this town is a bit short on space. As such, squandering it is one of our biggest taboos. Manspreading, standing in the middle of the escalator, leaving your kid’s stroller in the foyer — all more than sufficient to earn the scorn of your fellow New Yorkers.
Oddly, many of us take for granted the single greatest and most egregious waste of space in the entire city: on-street parking. Indeed, the same neighbor who calls management when forced to circumvent a Maclaren stroller while checking the mail may think nothing of having to squeeze between a pair of stationary SUVs in order to cross the street, or being forced to sidestep piles of trash because a perpetually occupied curb requires us to place our garbage on the sidewalk for collection. When someone robs us of a few inches on the subway, we’re indignant, but three million on-street parking spaces — almost all of which are free on a first-come, first-served basis — are considered due to any vehicle owner who wishes to park themselves in their very own slice of prime New York real estate for however long they wish.
Of course, the fact that something as profoundly valuable as street space is being given away for free for the sole purpose of personal property storage results in some very strange behavior. In Manhattan, where the street space is most valuable, vehicle owners have been known to guard “their” spots — camping out in their cars for hours at a time so that they are not flushed away during street cleaning. In this scenario, the car is not a transportation tool, but a very expensive placeholder that can squat on public property for you in absentia. Like that fancy luggage set you got as a wedding gift, the car only gets used a handful of times a year at best. Unlike said luggage, a car doesn’t encroach on your personal New York City square footage allotment because you can simply make it everybody else’s problem the rest of the time. A Diamanti Lux Leather Gucci Heritage Travel Trunk and a BMW X4 both cost around $50,000, but only one comes with the expectation that you get to leave it in public space whenever you feel like it and get to call the police if anybody else tries to take it. Ironically, the most coveted parking spaces are in the wealthiest, and most transit-rich neighborhoods, which means the New Yorkers clinging to the curb most tenaciously need a car and free parking less than perhaps anybody else in the United States.
Nothing elicits this strange behavior of car parkers more than a street redesign project that requires removal of parking. In Rego Park, a deli owner blamed the Queens Boulevard bike lane and a concomitant loss of parking for his decision to close shop. A Daily News op-ed insisted that everyone who visits Little Italy in the Bronx needs to come by car: “What would they do — ride the 2 train with two-gallon cans of olive oil on their laps? Ever seen a bike rider balance two mozzarella balls, 10 pounds of meat and a loaf of bread on their handlebars for the miles-long journey to Park Slope or Pleasantville?” (Clearly, he doesn’t get out much, because bikes move pretty much all the prepared food in the city.) And in a New York Times article about the 14th Street busway, a liquor store owner and a pizzeria owner said they feared that the busway would harm their businesses — as though anybody is giving up a parking spot for a bottle of red and a slice.
There’s plenty of evidence that removing parking in order to create room for bike lanes and transit is good for business, but commonsense should be more than sufficient to convince anyone that cars don’t equal customers. Sure, if a VW Bug with polka dots pulls up in front of your deli and 50 hungry clowns emerge, you’re probably going to sell a lot of pastrami sandwiches that day, but with Ringling Bros. calling it quits, this scenario is more unlikely than ever. The reality is that cars are big and unwieldy and often contain only a single person, which makes them wildly inefficient customer deployment vehicles in any environment. The status quo, which is a handful of legally parked cars and a second handful of illegally double-parked cars, only serves to keep everyone else away. If your goal is to get as many people to your business as possible, insisting they come by car is like putting your groceries away in the fridge without taking them out of the shopping bags first.
The good news is, if we can get past the parking fetishists, all these spots give us a lot of space to work with. In commercial areas, we can replace parking with loading zones so businesses can receive deliveries more efficiently, and so customers who actually do need to transport large items by motor vehicle can pick them up without resorting to double-parking. In residential neighborhoods, we can charge for parking and use the revenue and the reclaimed curb space to overhaul our waste collection system. And, of course, we can create wider sidewalks, secure on-street parking for bikes, play spaces for kids, and sitting areas for adults, while freeing-up sightlines so you can actually see around the corner when you need to cross the street.
It’s all more than possible. We just need to get all those placeholders out of there.
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