Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by StanislavPetrov on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @06:04PM
(#17719920)
Agree with all of this except the part about enforcing the traffic laws against cars parked in the bike lanes. The NYPD is most certainly lazy and incompetent (as well as corrupt), but the issue is the bike lanes themselves. Most of the city, especially the most congested parts, simple have no room for a bike lane. The vast majority of vehicles blocking the bike lanes are making pickups or deliveries. There is simply nowhere else for them to pull over (much less park). This fact was ignored by Bloomberg and his friends when they drew bike lanes all over the place on congested roads. It may be a noble goal to have plenty of space for bikers and pedestrians, but that isn't the way New York was designed, and its not feasible as long as the residents and the businesses depend on a steady stream of deliveries, pickups, garbage removal and other assorted vehicles associated with living in a city. Giving tickets to the UPS driver who has to deliver a package at a location is just going to cost him money, not deter him from pulling over - he has no choice.
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Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by CydeWeys on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @06:21PM
(#17720067)
Here's the thing though. Those bike lanes are clearly being used by lots of people, as are the travel lanes by lots of drivers. What isn't being utilized well is all of that free parking along the street -- most of those vehicles only move twice a week when they have to because of street sweeping.
So the simple solution is to eliminate all of the free parking and replace it with paid parking and loading zones. And raise the price high enough so that there's always spots free close enough to where you're going so that vehicles have a place to park themselves for short periods of time that's outside of the travel and bike lanes.
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by vonmoltke on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @08:46PM
(#17720911)
> So the simple solution is to eliminate all of the free parking and replace it with paid parking and loading zones.
There's free parking in Midtown?
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @06:18PM
(#17720033)
> There is simply nowhere else for them to pull over
Yes there is. We've just zoned it for streetside parking.
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by StanislavPetrov on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @06:51PM
(#17720301)
Do you live in New York? Have you been to Manhattan? There is very little parking anywhere. In the busiest places there is no street parking at all.
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @06:53PM
(#17720319)
> Have you been to Manhattan?
I live on 26th Street. We have a bike lane, a traffic lane, and two sides of street side parking. This is the case across a large faction of Manhattan, the avenues exempted. For Exhibit A in stupid parking lanes, I present Broadway.
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by CydeWeys on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @06:59PM
(#17720363)
I live and work in Manhattan and there's on-street parking everywhere. Most streets are easily wide enough for two travel lanes plus a bike lane, but instead have one or two rows of parked cars. It's quite common for streets to have two parking lanes, one travel lane, and no bike lanes.
Just pull up satellite imagery on Google Maps and it'll all be obvious.
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by zjaffee on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @08:19PM
(#17720784)
Are you sure about this? Maybe this is true on avenues, but at least with the new york I know well (grew up in greenwich village), the streets are very narrow (one parking lane and one driving lane is already tricky), with avenues sometimes being wider.
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by sethhochberg on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @08:35PM
(#17720856)
The village, particularly west of 6th Ave, is one of the only parts of Manhattan I can think of where 1 traffic lane and 1 parking lane is the norm. Once you get above 14th St or east of 6th Ave, its pretty much 2 parking lanes, one travel lane, and sometimes a bike lane nestled between the parking and the traffic on the crosstown streets (and on your major crosstown streets like 14th, 23rd, etc... still two lanes of parking, and often two lanes of traffic, but almost never any kind of bike facilities)
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by zjaffee on Thursday August 09, 2018 @01:19PM
(#17726235)
I'm also talking about the area around washington square park. The majority of the streets only allow one side of parking at any given time (with opposite side of the street parking for cleaning), where the streets are one way. Should a truck be doing any unloading on these streets, virtually no one can get through (where that is often true in midtown as well on regular streets..
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by StanislavPetrov on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @07:12PM
(#17720437)
I live and drive here. Parking is virtually non-existent.
You see the sea of red lines? Those are all places you cannot park.
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by CydeWeys on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @07:54PM
(#17720641)
I'm seeing a sea of green as much as I am a sea of red. "Parking is virtually non-existent" is so far from the truth I don't even know where to begin with that. You're literally looking at the map and complaining that not every single square foot of Manhattan can be used for parking. Guess what, land in the densest city in the country has better uses than parking cars. And yet in many neighborhoods almost every single block has twice the parking space than it does driving space (go look at East Village on that map). I think you're complaining about Midtown Manhattan, but what alternative solution could you possibly want? It's a simple matter of physics. The space just isn't there. There's no room to add parking; there's not even any room for people to drive or walk on the sidewalk.
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by StanislavPetrov on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @09:54PM
(#17721163)
The issue we are discussing is bike lanes. My whole point is the space just isn't there, and issuing tickets to trucks making deliveries in the vast areas that don't have parking isn't going to make it any better.
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by TheSpiceIsLife on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @08:05PM
(#17720701)
Looks to me like that map indicates about half of one side of all the steeets are ok for parking?
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by StanislavPetrov on Wednesday August 08, 2018 @09:49PM
(#17721144)
Take another look. Everywhere that is not green means that trucks, garbage trucks, UPS vans, and every other delivery service has to pull over and block a potential bike lane to make a delivery. That would be true even if every green area was open, and nobody else was parked anywhere. There is a reason that parking garages charge what they do in Manhattan, and its not because there is parking available on the street. ITT are people who have clearly never driven in the city, let alone made deliveries.
Re:Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown
by CydeWeys on Friday August 10, 2018 @10:55AM
(#17733767)
Most on-street parking isn't paid, so almost everywhere that's green on that map isn't available for delivery services anyway; it's going to be taken by personal vehicles that move twice a week for street-sweeping. Add more on-street parking and you'll just have more people with personal vehicles using it; it won't make it available for deliveries.
The best way to make delivery drop-off points available is to get rid of all the free parking and make it all paid, and keep raising prices on a block-by-block basis until there's typically spots free on any given block. It'll be a minor marginal cost for someone making a delivery to pay, say, $5/30 minutes (this will probably actually be cheaper if it means they can find a nearby spot, thus saving time driving around and time shuttling things from a farther spot). But $5/30 minutes works out to $240/day, which will easily discourage long-term parkers who shouldn't be using the scarce resource of on-street parking in busy areas anyway.
In less busy (i.e. purely residential) areas, it might make sense to move to a permit model, with permits costing several hundred dollars per month. There'd of course be parking meters mixed in with all that for people who are driving to the area and don't have permits.