Little love for parking-fees-to-fund-MTA plan
A state Senate plan to raise money for the MTA by charging New York City motorists to park on their neighborhoods’ streets got an ambivalent reaction Wednesday — and it is just the latest in a long line of parking permit proposals.
The Senate plan, part of its state budget proposal, would cap the monthly permit price at $30, and allot 20% of the spaces in permit zones to visitors. Only vehicles registered in New York would be eligible for permits.
Retired Forest Hills financier Ed Schemitsch, 66, said he was opposed to the plan — to him, it’s just “another thing that people are getting charged for.”
“If you want to eliminate parking spots and do something different that’s fine,” Schemitsch said. “But to have people in certain neighborhoods pay for parking seems a little bit too much.”
“They have meters all over the place already.”
But another Forest Hills resident, Yolanda Fazio, 35, said it might be a good way to bar motorists from outside the neighborhood. “I think neighborhood people only,” said Fazio, a stay-at-home-mom. “I think there’s too many people from other places that come and we don’t know who they are.”
The idea of keeping outsiders out also appealed to Steve Weyman, 50, a mail handler from Kew Gardens. “That sounds good. That sounds better than other people parking there,” he said.
Weyman said parking in his neighborhood is so bad he has to use a private parking lot. “It’s terrible — I pay for it,” he said.
The proposal surfaced this week as one of several ways the state Senate seeks to fund the MTA, which is set to face an $1.2 billion deficit next year without additional revenue streams.
The parking permit program was proposed in a budget blueprint released by the Senate on Tuesday. The blueprint is a starting point for negotiations between lawmakers and Gov. Hochul over the overall form of the state’s 2023 budget.
While the permit program is on the table, its inclusion in the Senate proposal is no guarantee it will survive negotiations.
Residential parking permits are the norm in many American cities, including Boston, Washington DC, and San Francisco. In Boston, there’s no charge for resident parking permits, which are issued in a number of the city’s residential neighborhoods. Visitors are allowed to park for two hours in some areas during some times of day.
A spokesman for Sen. Michael Gianaris (D-Queens), the Senate’s deputy majority leader, said the program would raise an estimated $400 million a year for the MTA.
Parking permits have been proposed several times before.
A nearly identical plan was backed in 2009 by then-Sen. Daniel Squadron and former Assembly member Joan Millman, both Democrats. It had the backing of the City Council, but was opposed by the city Department of Transportation and failed to garner support in Albany..