The NYC Parking Crisis

I have a friend from Virginia who moved to NYC for a job many years ago. During the pandemic he returned to Virginia, but returned to NYC after COVID had subsided, claiming that he missed “walking.” He claimed walking in NYC was more enjoyable than back in Richmond and I don’t doubt him, after all, he does walk a lot. But he once told me how he’s bummed that NYC doesn’t have more bowling alleys. He likes bowling, owns a bowling ball and all.

We had a conversation that went something like this. He said, “There’s not really any places to bowl in NYC.” I said: “There is one in LIC. I remember walking by it a long time ago.” To which he responded: “Yes, but it is very expensive. There’s a cheaper one out in Flushing, but that’s inconvenient to get to.”

I never thought much about the lack of bowling alleys in NYC, but I’m not a bowler. I’ve done it a couple of times, but that’s it. But my friend, who loves it, could say that NYC has a “bowling alley shortage” or “scarcity” or even “crisis” if he wanted to be dramatic. Of course, most people laugh at calling it a “crisis.” I mean, how many people even bowl in NYC?

If I had to guess, the large amount of space bowling alleys require is the reason for the “Bowling Alley Crisis,” but don’t quote me.

NYC has several crises, with different people placing a different weight on different ones: a child care crisis that affects parents, a housing crisis that affects everyone, a homeless crisis (which is just another version of the housing crisis), a transit crisis that affects everyone who uses transit, a street safety crisis that affects everyone outside of a car, etc. But one that urbanists tend to ignore is the “Parking Crisis.”

With City of Yes underway, Urbanist Twitter has taken to constantly list more car-dependent cities that have eliminated Parking Minimums: from Anchorage, Alaska to Buffalo, New York. “If city X can remove parking minimums, why can’t NYC, the transit capital of the country, do so?” I used to ask the same exact question, but I believe I understand now: very few people in those cities have ever said, “there’s not enough parking.”

Unlike NYC, these cities are more parking than cities, so the idea that there is a “parking crisis” just doesn’t exist in the residents’ minds. There’s no roaming around looking for parking at 1 am, no looping the block looking for parking to visit a friend or family member. Unlike any of those other cities, NYC is very dense, even in far away places like eastern Queens, southern Brooklyn, northern Bronx, etc. Of course, you could opt for a garage, but then you’re paying for the parking, which people tend to avoid. However, that begs the question: do we have a Parking Crisis or a Cheap Parking Crisis? One easy solution to the roaming problem is to charge for parking, an idea that has gotten some traction lately in the form of resident parking permits, though only time will tell if it takes hold.

But just like the bowling alley crisis of NYC, the parking crisis is also something that only affects some people: people who have and move about by cars. That is a minority in NYC (an even smaller minority if you don’t count those who garage their cars), the only US city with this fact, but still a sizable minority, and more importantly, a wealthier minority, and with that wealth comes political power, which is why even though we are the transit and walking capital of the country, removing parking is so damn hard.

But here’s the thing: it is not possible to fix the parking crisis in NYC. For every new unit of housing you create with a parking space, that’s a new car that needs parking at home, work, store, etc. On top of that, NYC parking minimum ratios are below 1.0, so for every new building we add, we add fewer parking spaces than we add people. Unless we’re willing to raze NYC, like those other cities were, to make space for abundant parking (and kill the population in the process), then it’s a losing battle. Instead, we should talk about another, more important, and fixable crisis that hides behind the parking crisis: The Mobility Crisis.

There are indeed places around NYC where having a car is very convenient. These places are often called “transit deserts.” Though I argue there are no transit deserts in NYC, we just have unreliable buses that we don’t count as “transit” (and there’s a straightforward and clear solution to that: bus prioritization projects). That said, there is still a mobility crisis: let’s be honest, the idea that you can live your whole life off of a bus, even a reliable one, is ridiculous. You will eventually want to move about on your own for many things that are too far for walking.

But how can we provide independent mobility to all New Yorkers in a scalable way? How can we do so without requiring costly car parking in every new housing development (exacerbating the housing crisis), every new business (making many businesses impossible), etc? The answer is micro-mobility: Bikes, cargo bikes, mopeds, CitiBike, tiny cars like Cantas, etc. But just like the bus example, this requires that we rethink how our streets function and what we prioritize on them, which in turn requires that we rethink parking, which may require the removal of car parking. But hey, didn’t you hear? There’s a Parking Crisis!

At the end of the day, NYC is about 304 square miles housing almost 9 million people, so there’s not a whole lot of space here. We are going to have to prioritize which crisis we focus on. As the one that affects everyone and everything, from inflation to whether families stay together or split apart, we should prioritize the Housing Crisis and let the Parking Crisis go the way of the Bowling Alley Crisis.