The traffic problem in NYC that Mayor Bloomberg and his traffic Commissioner Jeanette Sadik-Khan made so much noise over, spent so much money to solve and introduced kamikaze bicycles to implement, has been a complete and utter failure. Streets that once had some semblance of traffic flow like Columbus Avenue above Lincoln Center, 8th Avenue below the thirties, Times Square and Broadway below Houston are now as jammed up as any of the worst streets in the city.
Bus bulbs, those bus stop traffic blockers have all but brought traffic on streets like lower Broadway to a complete halt, contributing nothing to the facilitation of traffic flow but adding significantly to the opinion that Sadik-Khan had a cousin in the concrete business.
In mid-town, where the big draw theatre business requires everyone involved to arrive at a small area at precisely the same time every night, the brain dead traffic commissioner, backed by the omnipotent mayor blocked off streets so people could sit and chat, causing the greatest traffic jam since the last subway strike. It now takes 45 minutes to come across 47th Street from Park Avenue to between Seventh and Eighth, where the theatres are. It used to take between five and ten minutes.
In a city where streets are nowhere near broad enough, we have blocked already clogged lanes with bus bulbs and bicycle lanes. In a city that struggles with snow removal most of the winter, Bloomberg and Sadik-Khan have encouraged bicycle riding on snow covered, slippery streets. They did everything they could possibly have done, outside of blowing up a building and letting it collapse into the mess that is now Times Square to completely screw up traffic flow but they never even approached the real problem, the real impediment to traffic flow – parking.
Our new mayor, ever cognizant of where his campaign money comes from, has gone after what he thought of as a new and easy target, attacking Uber, the new force in the taxi industry.
Uber came in with a new idea that worked and it immediately put a huge crimp in the medallion cab industry, who have given generously to de Blasio’s election war chest. The mayor jumped on Uber and the riders jumped back at the mayor. Extra cars moving along the streets aren’t the problem. The problem is vehicles blocking the free movement of those cars and the blockages come from double-parked vehicles.
That’s right. Drive along almost every street in the city, almost any hour of the day or night, and your path will be blocked by double-parked trucks. These trucks have become the target of all driver’s ire, but that’s because they are shortsighted and I do mean that they can’t see all the way to the curb. The trucks are actually doing something important, creating a climate of activity, functioning to move goods, repair problems, etc. The reason they are double-parked is because the curbs are lined with parked private cars.
If you own or work in a small store that gives you access to the curb its easy to run out the door and put money in the meter all day long and a hell of a lot cheaper than putting your car in a garage. If you live in the city and own a car and don’t mind moving it for alternate side parking twice a week, then it’s a hell of a lot cheaper to street-park, than to put said car in a garage. The guy who lives in the neighborhood gets first shot at all the parking spaces, because he’s there. When a repairman or a deliveryman comes onto the block, they have to double-park, thereby slowing or blocking traffic and if it’s a big enough truck, shutting traffic down completely.
Why does the city not attack this real problem? Votes. There are a hell of a lot of drivers in this city that have cars and don’t want anyone messing with their free parking privileges. So what’s the answer? Well, there are three. One is to ban street parking completely. To do that the city would have to embark on a massive parking garage construction plan, because like it or not there is a certain amount of private car parking that is essential. There must be certain kinds of accommodations, like handicapped, which will be scammed immediately, much like the service dog con at airports. Maybe we should leave part of each block for trucks. That would work until there were more trucks on a given block than spots.
The second solution is to force trucks to make deliveries at night. This would add tremendously to the cost of doing business in the city because businesses would have to employ people at night to receive those deliveries. This could be off-set by tax breaks to pay for those extra employees and this in turn would create extra jobs, at precisely the level that is most in need of employment. This may sound good but it won’t eliminate the need for service trucks that must be on the streets during the day when service and repairs are needed.
One additional concept that would help make this solution better would be an addition to the building code that would require service alleys be installed on any construction that takes place on vacant or otherwise unimpaired land. This is a process that exists in Chicago and has worked very well there. It gets the delivery trucks off he streets and into the alleys where they do not obstruct traffic and allows for deliveries to be made through the backs of stores.
The other solution, probably the most functional one is to charge for street parking. I’m not speaking about meters, I’m into real money. It costs anywhere from four to six hundred a month to put your car in a garage in Manhattan. The city could sell street parking permits for three hundred a month. They do it in Boston and it seems to have worked. There are tens of thousands of cars street-parked in New York City every day. Most of them are the property of people who rarely use them but keep them in this crowded city for their occasional convenience. Think what that would do for the tax base. Of course, a lot of people who now street-park their cars for nothing, would get rid of them right away if they had to pay a substantial fee to park them. This is especially true of those who only use a car once or twice a month.
There are at least a dozen cars on my short block that almost never leave it. They are moved from side to side by doormen or owners who don’t work.. They stay there, blocking the streets because it costs their owners nothing but a small tip or a half hour sitting in a double-parked car until the street cleaner goes past. If the city charged those owners a considerable monthly fee it would become cheaper and easier to get rid of the cars and just rent, when they need one. This will create exactly the result for which we search. There will be less cars street-parking and more spaces for trucks. Of course metered parking fees will have to rise to approach the level of street permits and we must maintain a certain number of meter spaces. Most private car transportation in the city is a luxury and should be charged for as such. Some is essential, again for various kinds of services and that traffic, can be accommodated by special permits.
It wouldn’t be surprising for the number of street parked cars to be cut in half leaving one side of every street free for truck only parking and mostly eliminating the now common practice of double parking.
I don’t expect de Blasio to try this solution now. He is, after all, a politician, and more than anything, he wants to be re-elected, but maybe when he reaches the point where his eligibility has run out he will man up and consider the only really workable solution that the traffic problem has ever seen. Bloomberg could have done it as a lame duck mayor but then he would have had to admit that the bicycle lanes, the bus bulbs, the mid-street cafes and the middle of the street parking spaces had failed and after the football stadium in the west side rail yards went up in smoke, his ego really wasn’t up to taking another big hit. Let’s see if de Blasio has the stones to endanger his long-term goal of a seat in the White House and do something to help the city that elected him.