NEW YORK — Every year, drivers in New York City spend, on average, 107 hours — or more than four days — looking for parking spaces.
The vast majority of street parking is free, but there never seems to be enough spots.
Residents leave their cars parked for weeks at a time. Cars with license plates from other states camp out on residential blocks. Parking rules are so complex and time-consuming that many drivers choose to rack up fines rather than follow them.
Delivery trucks, garbage workers, taxi drivers, and honking motorists squeeze by parked cars on narrow side streets, sometimes ripping off mirrors or leaving scrapes on bumpers.
There are about 3 million parking spaces in New York City, which should be enough for the roughly 2 million vehicles owned by New Yorkers, according to an analysis of census data from 2024.
About 97 percent of the spots are free to park in, according to the city’s Transportation Department, and available for anyone with the time, patience, and anger-management skills needed to find them.
In a city as dense as New York, where every other square foot of space comes at a premium, why is it that nearly all parking is free? And should it be?
“The most precious commodity and real estate is street space and curb space,’’ said Ya-Ting Liu, who until March served as the city’s chief public realm officer. “We give it out for free, which makes absolutely no sense.’’
Overnight parking became legal in the 1950s, and the idea of charging for street parking has been raised repeatedly in the decades since. The proposals are always met with resistance.
But with a new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who says he wants the city to be less reliant on cars, parking reformers see an opportunity to reimagine the streetscape. Mamdani created an Office of Curb Management that aims to make the streets more orderly and could increase turnover for parking spaces.
Mike Flynn, the mayor’s transportation commissioner, said regulations around parking and curb space had not “evolved quickly enough’’ since the ban on overnight parking was lifted 72 years ago.
“The result is a curb that too often feels chaotic and unsafe, and that must change,’’ Flynn said.
Experts agree that the current system isn’t working for anyone: not the New Yorkers hunting for parking, not visitors from out of town, not those focused on boosting the city’s coffers, or those who want to see fewer cars on the streets.
What could be done to fix it? That depends on whom you ask. Here’s how several top proposals could transform parking.
More metered spots
Less than 3 percent of parking spaces on New York City streets have paid meters. That’s about 80,000 spots.
Most of the meters that do exist are along busy corridors, with higher hourly rates in the core of Manhattan.
Meter placement often feels arbitrary. Much of the East Village, a busy Manhattan neighborhood, has no meters. Nostrand Avenue, a major artery in Brooklyn, has meters over most of a 5-mile stretch, but they end abruptly north of Fulton Street.
Adding meters in busy neighborhoods could improve turnover for spots, research suggests, and raise revenue for the city.
Seeking alternatives to avoid paying for meters overnight, car owners may choose to move to garages — which can cost $500 per month or more, depending on the neighborhood — park farther afield, or sell their cars. They could also turn to car-share programs, which set aside parking for shared vehicles.
When the city tries to add meters, there is often fierce opposition from neighbors, including on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last year, where residents revolted, the local City Council member complained people had been “blindsided,’’ and the city backed down.
Critics argue that those pushing for reforms “hate people who own cars,’’ in the words of Vickie Paladino, a council member who represents a district in Queens that is home to many car owners.
Residential parking permits
Most parking on residential streets is open to all drivers, not just those who live nearby. But many other major cities, including Los Angeles and Chicago, have permits to reserve parking for neighborhood residents.
Residential parking permits in New York could cost $100 per year to far more than that, experts say, with higher rates potentially prodding residents to give up their cars. Some spots could be set aside for visitors.
But permits would not necessarily solve the problem of the demand for parking outpacing the supply. And some transit groups oppose the idea, arguing that there are better ways to use the street space and that parking should not be guaranteed.
Rachel Weinberger, a vice president at the Regional Plan Association, an urban planning think tank, said permits alone would not make parking easier. She also argued that they would have to be prohibitively expensive in order to deter ownership.
“A permit would only be a hunting license, meaning that you’re allowed to look for a space,’’ she said. “It should mean you’re guaranteed a space.’’
Experts say that permits could be paired with an incentive for drivers: fewer alternate-side parking days for street sweeping. Most drivers are required to move their cars once or twice a week so the streets can be cleaned, and some choose instead to leave them in place and eat the costs of the $65 tickets they receive. Moving to monthly street sweeping could make the prospect of buying a permit more appealing.
Dynamic pricing
Some urban planners want to phase out free parking altogether. Transportation Alternatives, a street safety group, has pushed for eliminating free parking and argued that the city would benefit if fewer car trips were made.
“If you look around the world, there are many other transit-oriented cities that are safer, more efficient, and healthier,’’ said Ben Furnas, the group’s executive director.
The city could reclaim many miles of streets, which proponents argue could be better used for public spaces, bus lanes, bike lanes, outdoor dining setups, and trash containers.
Paid parking spaces could use dynamic pricing, a system in which the cost of a spot varies by demand. Right now, parking rates are as low as $1.50 for the first hour.
Critics of such pricing models have argued that higher street-parking costs could hurt lower-income drivers or local businesses that rely on drivers. In 2019, Hoboken, N.J., announced a version of dynamic pricing on high-demand blocks, but the mayor and City Council repealed the plan after residents’ opposition.
But the idea has worked elsewhere. In 2018, after a successful pilot program, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency introduced demand-based pricing for the 10 percent of the city’s parking spots that are paid spaces, roughly 27,000 in all.
An evaluation of the pilot found that drivers spent 43 percent less time searching for a parking space, which in turn helped reduce car-based pollution. And once parking became easier, sales revenue increased for nearby businesses.
The rates in San Francisco can vary by block, time of day, or day of the week. Meters on the busiest blocks cost $11.75 an hour. The agency reviews parking meter data and decides whether to raise or lower rates.
Charles Komanoff, an economist and traffic modeler who helped create New York’s congestion pricing program, said dynamic pricing for parking could do even more than tolls did to improve the flow of traffic.
“I can’t imagine anything better,’’ he said.
As Mamdani weighs how to improve city streets and whether parking regulations should change, almost everyone agrees the status quo is unacceptable.
“The dumbest thing is just to keep things the way they are,’’ said Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.