Archive for February 8th, 2008
Downtown parking prices: gouging or too cheap?
February 8, 2008“Parking is not a constitutional right,” the mayor of Bogotá, Columbia, told car-owning citizens of his third-world city a few years ago as he made them stop blocking sidewalks built for pedestrians.
That may be one reason Enrique Penalosa was a one-term mayor (1998-2001), but he did wonders for Bogotá and, last night in a fully-packed auditorium at Griffith University, I got to hear him talk about cars, parking, and what makes cities great.
His words, delivered with energy and passion, had particular force for me because I had just been reading squeals of protests about a sharp increase in fees for parking cars in our CBD (central business district).
“Brisbane parking prices are out of this world” according to a headline in the 7 February “City News,” the cover of which shows a concerned young woman holding car keys and pondering “why it costs you more to park in Brisbane than in New York.”
Inside, a story by Brooke Falvey says monthly parking fees have jumped 66 per cent and a reserved parking space in the CBD can cost “as much as $750 a month” while “long-term parking bays in downtown Manhattan” lease for $276 (US$250).
Falvey says the NY City Department of Transport provided that information and it appears that some parking lots in America’s largest city do have rates in that neighborhood, although most cost more.
By going to an Internet site that lists the prices and contact information for more than 700 commercial Manhattan purveyors of parking, www.bestparking.com, I found two parking lots offering rates lower than what a single line in the “City News” story lists as the lowest monthly rate in Brisbane, $180, or US$161.
One low-cost NY lot was at 10th Avenue and Harlem River Drive and the other was on 155th Street. Neither address means much to me, but, according to bestparking.com, Read the rest of this entry »