An Obvious Issue

“The Battle for the Streets of New York” by Dodai Stewart and illustrated by Leon Edler, in Monday’s New York Times, is a reasonable discussion of congestion on Manhattan’s streets. Not just car congestion – delivery truck, bus, bicycle, and pedestrian congestion are discussed as well. This is a hot topic right now with the advent of congestion pricing for cars only months away, but people have been complaining about congestion on New York’s streets for 200 years or so.

The article is exactly right about the problem: there are too many people and vehicles competing for a finite amount of space, and the crowding has been exacerbated by the growth in the size of the average private car and by various new uses for street space, like the parking-lane eateries that came about during Covid.

But one issue is barely touched upon: the use of public space for private vehicle storage. If the typical side street is 60 feet wide, it has room for four street (vehicular) lanes and two sidewalks. (Note that the first half of the twentieth century included wave after wave of sidewalks being made narrower to increase the number of street lanes.) Except that two of those driving lanes are used for parking and the two remaining are rather narrow and often effectively become one lane. If you take the width of a line of parked cars as 9 feet, 30 percent of the total street area is dedicated to parking, and those cars represent far less than than 30 percent of the traffic of all kinds on the street. That may seem, today, like the natural order of things, but it’s important to note that overnight and long-term parking was illegal in New York until 1950. There’s a reason why old photos, like this 1922 view of Irving Underhill’s studio at Broadway and Park Place, don’t show parked cars: people didn’t park long term. There are exactly two cars visible at this busy intersection.

Car ownership in Manhattan is under 25 percent, so those parked cars are not benefitting the vast majority of people who live here. Imagine what we could do with the space if 30 percent of every side street, and 20 percent of every avenue, suddenly became available for use.