Do the math, and a street parking space in Manhattan may be worth upwards of $6,000 a year.
Justin FoxNovember 22, 2019, 1:00 PM GMT
Contrary to the practice in other big cities in the U.S. and around the world, parking on most New York City streets is free to all. 1 But it’s an expensive sort of free. For one thing, finding a space often involves a long, emissions-spewing search, which isn’t unique to New York but is an especially chronic problem here. For another, there are the alternate-side parking rules.
The rules vary by neighborhood, but on east-west streets in residential neighborhoods of the city’s most densely populated borough, Manhattan, each side of the street generally must be vacated for 90 minutes twice a week to make way for street sweepers. The result is that many Manhattan car owners spend three hours a week sitting in their vehicles, initially double-parked across the street from the side that is about to be swept, then parked in their new spaces after the sweeper comes through waiting for the no-parking period to expire.
Car-owning households in Manhattan had a median income of $134,000 in 2017. Let’s figure for the sake of simplicity that this income is earned with 40 hours of weekly labor, which comes to a rate of $64.42 an hour. At three hours a week of parking duty, with the 38 weekdays this year during which the parking rules are suspended due to religious or other holidays subtracted out, that comes to $8,581 a year.
This may exaggerate the cost, since on-street parkers in Manhattan probably have lower incomes than garage parkers, and from the looks of it lots of them are getting work done as they sit in their cars. Some may also attach value to the time they spend reading quietly or chatting with fellow parkers — and we know from Calvin Trillin’s classic novel of Manhattan parking, “Tepper Isn’t Going Out,” that some people relish the game of finding a space. So a better measure of the cost of street parking in New York may simply be how much people are willing to pay to avoid it. Garage fees vary a lot by neighborhood, but I think it’s reasonable to say the Manhattan average is somewhere around $500 a month, or $6,000 a year.
New York’s Free Parking Spots Are Worth Upward of $6,000 a Year – Bloomberg
Do the math, and a street parking space in Manhattan may be worth upwards of $6,000 a year. Justin FoxNovember 22, 2019, 1:00 PM GMT Contrary to the practice in other big cities in the U.S. and around the world, parking on most New York City streets is free to all. 1 But it’s an… [Read More]
