Just finished this article titled: New York City’s Parking Rules have Turned Me into a Sociopath. The author gives a mind-numbing account of bizarre parking regulations that require a constant shuffling of one’s automobile. When taken with other neighbors doing the same thing, they are in a never-ending game of musical cars. They seem to literally plan their day around this, with precise timing involved to ensure a spot.
The regulations are apparently designed by toddlers throwing darts at a clock. Here is one example:
… sign prohibits parking on a specific side of the street between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. every Tuesday and Friday
and his street: I live on a block in which parking is prohibited on Tuesdays between 8:30 and 10 a.m. on one side, and on Wednesdays between 8:30 and 10 a.m. on the other
The apparent reason is so street cleaning machines can sweep unimpeded.
So my questions:
Is this for real? Or a whoosh designed to fool us rubes in flyover country?
If this is real, why on earth do NYC streets need this much cleaning? I live in a typical Texas neighborhood, and I can assure you we don’t need weekly visits from streetcleaning crews. They do exist here, but are only seen following storms or such. The author claims detritus will pile up quickly if not removed. We rednecks are quite capable of keeping our streets clean without intervention from the city. What is so different about New Yorkers?
What on earth do their houses look like? Are there no driveways?
Please… fight my ignorance on this.
You haven’t seen New York in tv shows and movies? It’s substantially urban not suburban. The houses don’t have garages or driveways. They were built before cars existed. And many people live in apartments with no parking garages.
We have these rules in the 90024 but its thurs for the northbound lane and Fri for the southbound. The street cleaner is followed by a parking enforcer.
It’s hardly just NYC. Where I am outside of Philly I can’t park on my side on Monday mornings or the other side on Thursday mornings due to street sweeping.
It can be somewhat of a pain but since most people leave for work before 8:00 AM (the start of the restricted period) in practice it’s not really a big deal.
As to the necessity of street sweeping, I’ll be cynical and mention that fines from parking enforcement can be a substantial part of a municipalities budget.
Were you really under the impression that everyone has a driveway and a garage? Maybe this is why so many people think that plugin electric vehicles are a practical solution for everyone.
With the density of the population, basic design of the city, and the littering I would say it really is needed. As it is, as a visitor a couple times, the rat and garbage situation is about as bad as I’ve ever seen. Anywhere.
Driveways are common in the outer boroughs of New York City. I don’t know how prevalent street sweeping/cleaning are there, but I suspect it’s much less of a thing than in Manhattan.
Especially in Manhattan, use of cars is expensive (parking in particular) and often inconvenient, and the city is trying to make it even more so.
NYC has lots of houses with driveways (although it might be a short stubby thing suitable for exactly one car). But most city residents live in some kind of multi-family building, and they’re much less likely to have dedicated off-street parking.
How busy is your typical Texas street? This page from a Texas city indicates that the need for sweeping is greatly dependent on how much traffic the street gets, and that there are indeed streets in Texas that get swept twice a week (or even daily):
Things are a lot more crowded and there is a lot more traffic. Also winter.
What’s a house?
OK, seriously - the vast majority of NYC residents live in multifamily buildings ranging from townhouses to huge apartment buildings. Much of this was built before cars were common and few buildings have garages. There are suburban-esque areas in Queens and Staten Island and even some spots in Brooklyn and those places have single-family homes with driveways and garages. Obviously, it’s not an issue in those places. But those constitute a tiny minority of residents.
If you want a real culture shock, consider this: fewer than 45% of households in NYC even own a car, and the number of licensed drivers is the lowest in North America.
Sweeping streets regularly, in any heavily populated urban centre, is very cost saving compared to the major street flooding that blocked runoff drains can cause.
It’s not just NYC, and it’s not a tax grab or money making scheme. It’s simple common sense and good maintenance, to ultimately reduce costs.
It’s for real. It’s half for street cleaning (it is necessary to have clear streets for that) and half for revenue (as should be obvious to anyone who’s seen cops hovering like slobbering vultures around parked cars at 10 minutes-to-alternate-side-prohibition time).
We put up with it because we have to, and those of us who can move to a place where we have our own driveway do so as soon as possible. After five insane years of living with a car in a Manhattan apartment, I moved to Queens, and I love my driveway.
And New York is full of slobs who throw their garbage everywhere, despite the ubiquitous presence of city-supplied garbage cans. I’m happy that they sweep the streets, I just wish that they only ticketed cars that are actually blocking street sweeping, not swooping down on motorists who move their cars a second late with no sweeper’s arrival imminent, or who park a little early after the sweeper has already passed.
Indeed, and I’ve also heard that in those densely populated areas that if you want a place to park your car off-street every night, there are parking garages around but you need to pay monthly rent. I’ve heard (HGTV House Hunters type shows I think) of things like having to pay an additional $200/month for a single parking space.
17 years living and working in and about Manhattan here…
Yes. “Alternate side of the street parking” for cleaning purposes is a real thing. The schedule may seem “random” but it is presumably to make most efficient use of the street cleaning trucks and available parking spots.
They need so much cleaning because 8.5 million people (plus daily commuters) constantly using the streets can leave a big mess if left unchecked.
I would be extremely surprised if you did not have something similar in Dallas or Houston.
The difference is that a typical suburban neighborhood has a population density of around 400 to 8000 people per square mile. Manhattan has something like 65,000 people per square mile. Some non-zero percent of those people accidently drop gum, coffee cups, papers, hot dogs, falafels, and other trash in the street every day.
Most homes in Manhattan are either high rise apartment towers (the tallest being 432 Park Ave, which exceeds the height of the Empire State Building), old housing projects (like Styverson Town in the East Village) smaller modern mid-rise condos, old “walk-ups” and brownstones (brick faced townhouses than can be multi-family or one very wealth family). Some converted factories and lofts as well.
The outer boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn are also similarly populated, but with more older walk-ups, brownstones and converted warehouses and fewer (and smaller) modern residential buildings (although that is changing). As you get further away from Manhattan, you see more neighborhoods with single-family homes and driveways (for example, my friend lives in a 4BR home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn with a driveway and yard), but they are packed together much more tightly than you would see in Texas. Eventually, it all becomes pretty suburban as you cross into Long Island.
The Bronx is similar, but eventually transitions into Yonkers and suburban Westchester NY.
Staten Island I’m less familiar with. But from what I’ve seen it looks like very dense suburban neighborhoods with some condos and apartment complexes.
The main thing I should point out is that most New Yorkers don’t have or need cars for their day to day lives. And if they have them in the outer boroughs, they typically don’t need to drive them into Manhattan.
I’m always surprised when people ask how New Yorkers live, as if they don’t have a TV or ever seen a movie that takes place in New York. When I told a friend out in the Midwest how much my apartment cost, his wife was shocked and asked me how many rooms I lived in. It was a studio…so just the one room.
Yeah…accidentally…OK, you said “non-zero”, but I’ll bet that the percent is somewhere south of two who have accidents rather than are inconsiderate and/or careless.
And hey, if you want a garage for larger cars, you can move to Long Island, aka near a 100 miles of never-ending urban sprawl. Enough to put you off suburbs for the rest of your life.
It’s money making scheme around here. The city of Pawtucket RI makes around $1 million a year from street sweeping parking fines. If you’re lucky your street will get swept once a year there. The city doesn’t dispute it either, residents know they’ll have to pay more in taxes if that system ends, they prefer to have the cost borne by the people with cars they don’t have a place for.
Hell, never mind NYC when I briefly lived with a car on Chase and Calvert in Baltimore I had to deal with daily move-your-car restrictions. And not even for the sweeping but just so rush hour traffic would have all lanes available.
Older American cities’ urban cores were not designed for every dwelling and every workplace to have a dedicated parking space, that just is so.
• the city does not want you to own a freaking car. Seriously. They don’t want you driving. There isn’t enough roadspace for a bunch of private cars. Damn selfish of people to be owning their own private cars, streets are for buses, taxis, delivery trucks and vans, fire trucks, and cops. Ride the subway or take the bus like everyone else, willya?
• all those gyrations and gymnastics in the morning to play musical cars? Add to that the fun of finding a parking space when you use your car to go somewhere in the city. Where other cities may have signs that say “NO PARKING / Violators will be towed”, Manhattan has these. A trip by private vehicle to a concert, doctor’s office, shop, etc can easily take 15 minutes of driving followed by 25 minutes of trying to find a parking spot from which you won’t be ticketed and/or towed. And discerning the legitimate spaces can be difficult especially because you’re being honked at while you try to parse the meaning of the signs.
• Insurance companies don’t encourage you to own a vehicle in NYC. They have good reason. Rates are high. New York is a place where automobile pilots are a liability. At every corner, at ever turn, 37 pedestrians are in front of you, will step in front of your car with 1 ft 3 inches clearance without concern for whether you’re in motion, will jaywalk or cross against the red or walk in your lane to get around clots of other pedestrians, etc.
• Your car will last 1/4 as long as it should because you spend so much time accelerating hard then jamming on the brakes 35 yards later or bouncing over potholes and steel plates and whatnot. Manhattan is seriously rough on cars with the outer boroughs only marginally better.
