Lower Manhattan drivers who are chronically aggrieved by the local shortage of legal street parking should consider the bright side: They are contributing tens of millions of dollars per year in revenue to City coffers.
A new analysis by SpotAngels, a smartphone app that aims to soothe parking headaches by offering users real-time data about available street parking options nearby, cites three Downtown neighborhoods as among the worst in the City, by various metrics.
According to the SpotAngels study, the Financial District is the most hostile environment for parkers anywhere in the five boroughs, with an average of 25 tickets written for each parking space every year, and each space subsidizing City government with about $2,219 per year. (This is twice the average for Manhattan as a whole, where each parking space disgorges an average of $1,093 in annual revenue.) In FiDi, this amounts to 118,289 violations written every 12 months. With an average fine of $89.10 per ticket, these summonses contribute an annual $10,537,000 to municipal revenue.
In Tribeca, the outlook is only slightly less grim. In that neighborhood, every parking space is the location for 18 violations per year, ringing an additional $1,559 on the municipal cash register. This totals up to 71,215 annual tickets for the community as a whole, with an average price $87.60, yielding $6,236,236 in funds for the City.
Battery Park City earns the sad distinction of the highest average price per summons, at $101. (The community is tied with the Theater District for this title.) And if parking in Lower Manhattan is generally difficult, within Battery Park City, it borders on the impossible. The neighborhood is, in statistical terms, the most parking-deprived community in the five boroughs of New York City. With a residential population of more than 13,000 (and another 10,000 reporting here for work each day), it has just 201 parking spaces available to the public, of which 58 are metered and 143 are unregulated, except by alternate-side parking rules. (These figures come from a City Department of Transportation study, issued in 2008, the last year for which detailed numbers are available.) While there is ample curb space within the community’s 92 acres (enough for more than 1,600 parking spaces), 59 percent of it falls within zones that are signed “no standing” (785 spaces) and “no parking” (581 spaces). Much of the rest is set aside for commercial vehicles, buses, and vehicles displaying government placards.
Making matters worse, as many as half of these spaces that remain are commandeered each day by police officers and other government officials displaying credentials that effectively make them immune from parking tickets. This problem became worse in 2014 when the New York Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Strike Force (an arm of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration) rented 56,000 square feet of office space at Brookfield Place. This unit brings more than 250 law enforcement personnel from a dozen-plus agencies (including the NYPD, the FBI, the DEA, Customs, United States Secret Service, the New York State Police, the New York City Department of Correction, and the New York State Division of Parole) to Battery Park City each day. Because the cars they use for undercover work need to be concealed, these are stored in 130 garage spaces within 250 Vesey Street. That means, however, that the personal vehicles these officers and agents take to and from work are almost invariably parked (and often illegally) on the streets nearby.
Adding insult to penury, City parking enforcement (which ignores illegally parked vehicles displaying police credentials) sometimes tickets legally parked cars in Battery Park City. A 2016 study by Ben Wellington, a professor at the Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning found that over a 30 months period, the New York Police Department (NYPD) wrote 116 tickets (carrying fines totaling more than $19,000) for a legal parking space on Chambers Street, in front of Stuyvesant High School.
To read the SpotAngels analysis click here.