Build New York City for people, not automobiles
Robert Moses, the powerful civil servant who controlled many of New York City and State’s planning agencies from the 1920s to the 60s, transformed the greater New York City area through megaprojects from Jones Beach and Lincoln Center to the Triboro Bridge and Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Moses’s legacy is complex and far from sterling. He tore down entire neighborhoods and displaced the powerless and people of color in pursuit of “urban renewal”; his construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway is still responsible for some of the highest childhood asthma rates in the country. Our elected officials are well aware of Moses’s legacy — nearly all of them keep Robert Caro’s Moses biography “The Power Broker” on their shelves — but that’s not enough. We need them to use their power to undo the damage Moses left behind and bring our city into the 21st century.
Moses’ work over the course of decades had an underlying theme: to make New York a car-centric city at a time when wide highways and the family car signaled a new kind of freedom and prosperity, even if that “freedom” was most accessible for white, upper-middle-class New Yorkers. This thinking and vision was shared by many of Moses’ contemporaries, and arguably saw its apotheosis in New York City’s 1961 Zoning Resolution. Zoning governs how the city’s land can — and sometimes how it must — be used, and New York’s law became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Despite being the most densely-populated city in America, New York City’s public spaces remain dominated by cars even though the majority of New Yorkers do not actually own a car.
The 1961 resolution introduced government mandates that force all new construction in New York City to include a minimum number of new off-street parking spaces, regardless of whether residents need them, want them, or will even use them. Just as work is being done to undo other harmful legacies of Moses’s car-centric planning, we need to start addressing the negative consequences that parking minimums have wrought for housing affordability, climate, walkable neighborhoods and more.
Parking minimums make housing more expensive. Developers are forced to incorporate spaces for cars into the planning and building of residential projects — driving up costs, displacing ground-level retail, undermining mass transit and contributing to climate change — in a city where most residents don’t drive.
In a transit-dense city in the midst of a housing crisis, we shouldn’t force developers to build parking that residents don’t need because of a 60-year-old rule. Parking minimums impose a national deadweight cost of $440 million annually on carless renters, punishing mass transit users and forcing carless households (who tend to be lower-income) to subsidize car owners. Research shows that New York’s parking minimums are inflating rents by as much as 17% — gasoline on the fire that is New York’s longstanding housing crisis, where homelessness in recent years has reached the highest rate since the Great Depression.
Parking mandates are also placing a burden on New York’s businesses. Parking spots take up room that could be used by ground-level retailers, limiting opportunities for the small and local businesses that are most valued by New Yorkers and already struggle to compete with national chains.
Parking minimums also incentivize more people to own and drive cars, making both New Yorkers and the environment less safe. Traffic fatalities and injuries in New York are soaring, up 44% since last year, and increased vehicle emissions are directly contributing to the climate crisis. Meanwhile, the MTA — the best mass transit system in the world — is facing budget shortfalls and other challenges exacerbated by the pandemic-induced plunge in ridership. Eliminating parking requirements is a great tool for encouraging more New Yorkers to return to mass transit.
By design, Moses’ highways undermined the mass transit that most New Yorkers relied on and frequently wrecked the New York City neighborhoods around them — as in the infamous case of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, when he plunged a highway directly through existing neighborhoods. But even though he succeeded in building dozens of expressways, New York never became a car town.
Most New Yorkers want to see street space reallocated for other uses. Recent polling by the Regional Plan Association shows that New Yorkers believe 70% of street space should be dedicated to bikes, buses, pedestrians and other non-car uses. Right now it’s exactly the opposite, with 70% of street space dedicated to cars.
That same poll shows that New Yorkers are in favor of more housing, with the lack of affordable housing being a prime reason that people consider moving away from New York. Eliminating costly and outdated parking mandates is a common-sense reform that can go a long way towards solving many problems at once, and free our city from one of Moses’s most harmful legacies: parking mandates.