A signpost note, anarchy in Fort Greene - and the misery of the idle motor car

It’s not often that I’m seized with the desire to deface a sign in a public space. But, on a walk with the Invisible Visible Woman on Easter Sunday, I came very close to hacking down the handwritten notice that a householder in Nelson Street, near our apartment, had attached to a pole on the sidewalk.

“Please do not lock bicycle here, Thank You,” read the laminated note.

A rare insightment: a sign that begs to be torn down

The sign infuriated me because it struck me as an arrogant attempt to appropriate the right to dictate what happened on the public street outside the householder’s home. As a New York City taxpayer who in theory is on the hook for the cost of keeping the pole in place, I experienced the appropriation as a kind of theft.

Yet the more I’ve thought about it since, the more I’ve recognised that the householder’s act stood out only in the explicitness of its expropriation of public space. Nelson St, where parking is free, as it is on the vast bulk of New York City streets, was lined on both sides with parked cars. They had together turned the street from a potentially healthy artery in the city’s road system into a clogged, ill-functioning one. With fewer idle vehicles, the street could have had wider sidewalks, extra space for moving cars or, of course, a proper bike path.

But the sign on Nelson St – which I suspect was put there to ensure the householder could park his or her car without worrying about a bike’s obstructing the doors – illustrates how many people fail to grasp the true nature of free, on-street parking. There’s a tone of outrage about any effort to remove or curtail access to on-street parking that suggests many people think of parking spaces as essentially their property. The sudden gaps in New York’s cycle routes – where protected lanes turn into painted ones or painted lanes degenerate into “sharrow” markings – illustrate how tenaciously some communities hold onto their precious storage spaces.

 

Police supervise vehicle parking in the Kent Avenue bike lane:
a stark illustration of the depth of the city's problem.

It's my strong suspicion that the defence of parking arouses such fierce passions partly because the privilege is defensible only in emotional, rather than logical, terms. Motor cars in most developed countries, after all, spend on average 95 per cent of their time parked, taking up vast quantities of space given the paltry 5 per cent of their lives they spend actually moving. I suspect the idle time for many vehicles in New York City – where even carowners frequently commute by subway – is still higher than the average.

When they are moving, in addition, cars rely on a supply of free parking spaces at their destination. That must mean most cities have parking spaces to store far more cars than actually exist in the city. By definition, that’s space that’s taken away from actually moving things and people or generating economic value. The route to rational use of space and transport policy in many cities will almost literally have to run through the abolition of free on-street parking.

All that aside, I nevertheless feel some sympathy for motorists living in big cities over the stress of parking. There’s a purgatorial edge to the experience of trying to end one’s journey yet finding oneself desperately circling, running later and later for that meeting, and unable to stop.

It’s certainly no coincidence, I suspect, that a recently highly-publicised incident in New York where a police detective unleashed a tirade of racist vitriol at an Uber driver started when the detective was under the strain of looking for a parking spot.

I remember one resident's telling me in Fort Greene, when I was working on a story about the introduction of Citibike to the area, how he resented the loss of two parking spaces for a bikeshare station on his street. He already frequently spent half an hour circling looking for a parking spot at the end of a journey.

“What do I have to do?” he asked me. “Sell my house and move to where I can have a driveway?”

Who needs loading zones when you can get your watermelons
out in the middle of a busy street in The Bronx?

New York City also imposes on drivers the deeply-resented ritual of alternate side parking. Vehicles are banned for certain, brief hours each week from being parked on a certain side of each street, so that street cleaning machines can clean right to the kerb. When I first arrived in the city, I was baffled occasionally to see cars lined up, double-parked, on the wrong side of the street, their drivers patiently waiting for the sweeper to pass.

But it’s also easy for those used only to New York’s odd ways of doing things to lose sight of quite how anarchic the city’s parking culture is. When I lived in London, because most local shops had designated loading and unloading zones, it was rare to have to dodge round double-parked unloading trucks. In New York, double-parking is so endemic that Joel Rivera, a city council member, in 2013 introduced legislation, thankfully unsuccessfully, to make it legal for parents picking up children from school to double-park briefly.

Right by an intersection? Check. In the bike lane? Check.
Challenging weather? Check. The NYPD leads in New York's
parking chaos by terrible example.

When I visited Fort Greene to write about Citibike, local residents complained that residents of farther-flung parts of the borough drove to Fort Greene, parked on its streets and took the subway into Manhattan. Where I lived in London, the rules restricting some parking to holders of residents’ parking permits or their guests made it far harder for commuters to clog up local streets.

On my morning bike ride to work, even turning traffic lanes are clogged with parked vehicles which, because they are displaying the badge of some law enforcement agency, will be left unmolested, no matter how dangerously they are parked. I had never encountered such blatant abuse of official position - sadly a fairly standard aspect of NYPD behaviour - when living in the UK.

Five vehicles double-parked nose-to-tail in a rush-hour bike lane.
In other news, New York's cycling rate seems to be stalling.

The effects of New York’s parking anarchy and the reluctance to tackle it are far-reaching.  It’s thanks to parking’s being sacrosanct that I’m so often forced to ride up streets with narrow bike lanes painted in parked cars’ door zones – the most dangerous place to ride on the road. The lanes would be far better if more parking spaces were removed. Free on-street parking condemns vast swathes of land to producing no economic value at all. In many cities, congestion is one of the biggest external costs of motor vehicle use – and the presence of parked and double-parked cars on streets can only add to the hold-ups.

It significantly exacerbates the shortcomings of New York’s often inadequate bike lane network that vehicles park in many parts of it – both those segregated from traffic and painted lanes – with impunity. Cars parked right up to intersections frequently obscure what’s going on at intersections, increasing the risk of collisions. The sheer unpredictability of grappling with the constantly-shifting landscape of illegally-parked vehicles adds significantly to the stress of cycling in New York – and surely helps to account for the miserable proportion of trips in the city made by bicycle.

Nelson St: if you see the bikes locked to that pole and think
they're ruining the place, you'll fit right in.

There are few mysteries around how to alleviate cities’ parking problems. I remember my parents scrambling 40 years ago to buy parking tickets on my grandparents’ street in Edinburgh in Scotland under a then-new scheme to bring order to the city’s parking. It’s impossible to imagine so many New Yorkers would hang on to barely-used cars with dubiously-legal out-of-state registrations if parking cost a realistic amount in the densest parts of the city.

Yet I’ve heard since spotting the sign on Nelson St a week ago of a similar sign on another post elsewhere in the city. I see no evidence of any politician’s being willing to tackle the misery created by the wholesale storage of idle cars. New Yorkers continue, it seems, to accept the many problems created by motor vehicles but to express rage at the presence of far more space-efficient bicycles. Until that fundamental dynamic changes, many streets look set to continue to be like Nelson St – choked by the status quo, but full of residents raging at the prospect of change.