NAVIGATING NYC
How his Big Apple parking adventures informed local transit
When I moved to Brooklyn from Pittsburgh in 1975, I brought my car along. After all, just about everyone in Pittsburgh uses a car to take care of their basic needs, as well as their discretionary ones. So I applied that same reasoning to New York. But, as it turned out, that was a mistake. Having a car in New York can be a huge burden and expense.
It put me in mind of a joke I heard years earlier that went something like this: There was an old lady in New York who had a car, but she never used it because she was afraid she would lose her parking space. Everyone thought it was really funny, but they must never have had a car in New York.
Street parking in Manhattan and its surrounding boroughs is extremely difficult. And if you do find a legal place, there will be other drivers who want to park there, too. So they use a “create-a-space” method, which involves nudging your parked car forward or backward to make enough room for their car. We used to call this “parking by Braille.” It was fairly costly due to the repairs your car would need as a result of being shoved around.
On top of that, there were alternate parking regulations. That meant that every week, to allow street sweepers to do their work, parking was banned on the side of the street where you normally parked and you had to find an alternative spot on the other side until a designated hour. Then you would quickly park again.
Not only was alternate parking enforced by uniformed officers, it was socially enforced by your neighbors — people who had to move their own cars. If you had the nerve to step out of your car before the witching hour, those neighbors would yell at you from their own cars to get back inside. If they had to suffer the inconvenience, so should you.
Of course, garages were available for parking on a longer-term basis, but using them approached the cost of renting an apartment. So, after trying it for a few months, I found garaging impractical as well.
Fortunately, New York has a robust public transit system. The subway system runs 24/7 and there are buses that run at all hours through most of the city. But the buses tended to run in clusters rather than at scheduled intervals. The local joke was that buses ran in bunches to avoidgetting mugged.
Even so, I thought the subways were great, and I used them all the time. Of course, they were a bit funky with graffiti both inside and outside. And very few of them back then had air conditioning. But they did get you close to where you needed to go pretty much on time, and they did it in any kind of weather.
After a year or so of leavingmy car parked for months at a time in an obscure legal street spot I found, I finally realized that it was a serious liability, rather than an asset. So I advertised it for sale and sold it to some guys from Guyana.
At their request, I sold it with my Pennsylvania license plate still attached, and for the first time in a long while, I felt free. However, several years later, when a nutty cult leader in Guyana led his followers to drink cyanide-laced KoolAid in a mass suicide event, I worried that my car and my license plate would be found there and that it would implicate me. But it wasn’t.
Choosing to become transit-dependent brought some unexpected benefits. I became somewhat of an expert in navigating the subway system as well as conversant in its operations and history.
Some years later, when I returned to Pittsburgh and started working Downtown, I resumed using public transit. But it soon became clear how ineffective the Port Authority was in helping new riders to learn their system. So I became an advocate for transit improvements and an advisor on the Allegheny County Transit Council. My goal was to make the system more rider friendly for occasional and regular users, and I like to think the council helped in that effort.
Butafter a few years, when my own work destination shifted from Downtown to other locations, including Cranberry Township, I wasn’t able to use the system, so my ability to advise its managersessentially ended.
I still think that public transit is an essential asset to our region. And I hope that the leadership of what is now PRT (Pittsburgh Regional Transit), together with its regional partners, will continue to find innovative ways of serving a sprawling community whose work and living patterns are constantly evolving.