NYC parking -- Do people really live like this?

[P-man]

@Gatopescado

If you had a motorcycle in New York, and parked it on the street, how long would it sit before being stolen?

Never had mine stolen. The big problem was someone hitting it and knocking it over. That probably happened once a year.

[pulykamell]

@gotpasswords

I knew someone who lived in Chicago well before the invention of car share or quickie rental scheme like Zipcars, and they kept their car at their sister’s house in the suburbs. If they needed the car, they’d take the El and a bus to get to her house.

Saved them the twice a week irritation of the sweeper dance, and it was quicker and cheaper to keep a car in another city than it was to rent one as needed.

Some arterial streets are swept once a week, but neighborhood streets aren’t swept nearly that often in Chicago. They’re pretty much once a month, though some are even less often than that (Ours are swept 5 times in the street sweeping period of April 1 to mid-November; outside that time period, neighborhood streets don’t get swept). I can’t think of any place where it’d be twice a week.

[Fiveyearlurker]

@panache45

I lived in or around NYC for 25 years, and actually learned to drive (stick) in Manhattan. Except for times I lived out on Long Island, I was happy to be a pedestrian.

Yeah. My years in Manhattan were without a car. It was fantastic.

[Corry_El]

@Gatopescado

If you had a motorcycle in New York, and parked it on the street, how long would it sit before being stolen?

I don’t know stats for motorcycles, but car theft in NY was down 96% from the peak in 1990 to 2013.

Here’s Why Stealing Cars Went Out of Fashion (Published 2014)

But basically I’d say as the other response, if locked up it’s unlikely to go anywhere unless it’s eventually removed by the City for some reason. If you left the keys in it, it might disappear or not. I left the keys in my pretty nice car in Hoboken by accident a couple of years ago and it was still there by the time I realized it a couple of days later. But my wife did the same around 25 yrs ago and that car did disappear, recovered intact a short drive away in Manhattan, naturally with a sheaf of parking tickets.

[doreen]

@OldGuy

I’ll submit that if the ticket writer cannot tell if the street has been swept then sweeping didn’t accomplish it’s purpose (or perhaps wasn’t necessary in the first place). Around here a street that has just been swept is obviously cleaner.

That kind of depends on whether the ticket writer came five minutes after the sweeper or an hour and a half later, doesn’t it? And a constant enough rate of litter accumulation that "the sweeper came by 30 minutes ago " on Tuesday can be reliably distinguished from the “sweeper hasn’t come through yet” on Wednesday. It can’t for a lot of reasons, one of which is that both sides of the street are not cleaned simultaneously. And people are rarely out sweeping their sidewalks at exactly the same time as the street is swept. So there’s always going to be some amount of litter after the sweeper comes , and how long it takes to migrate after one side of the street or from the sidewalk is variable.

Street sweepers don’t come down my street - and if I sweep the street in front of my house on a day with any wind at all , within a half hour or so, you will not be able to tell that I swept that day and my neighbors haven’t swept in a week.
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[Scribble]

I live in NYC and have a car for work. (I go from house to house in the suburbs, so having a car is a necessity.) I pay $275 per month to park in a garage. I consider it well worth the money, just so that I don’t have to deal with the crazy alternate side of the street parking rules.

Actually, I’m considering changing to a different garage. I’d pay more, but the car would be closer to my apartment. (Right now, it’s 15 to 20 minutes, door to door, to get from my place to the garage. I’d like to bring that down to 5 minutes. Taking 30 to 40 minutes from my daily commute would, I think, add significantly to my general happiness.)

But there’s no way I’d ever regularly park on the street. Hell, no.