On Apr 10, 2008, at 12:30 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
> At 08:12 AM 4/10/2008, you wrote:
>
>> BTW it is faster by car to, door to door, and I can usually find
>> on street free parking in the East Village in about 10 minutes.
>>
>>
>> Matt
>
>
> Nuh uh. You pay 30 or 40 dollars for parking and you're stuck in
> traffic most of the way and loving it. 'Fess up.
I just noticed this. Finding free street parking in Manhattan in 10 minutes is extremely unusual. I have a lot of experience with this. It can take up to 45 minutes in the West Village or on the Upper West Side. The standard routine for finding longer-term parking is that you double park during an alternate side of the street period, wait for the garbage truck and street sweeper to come through, then move back. It means sitting in the car for an hour and a half.
Fun parking facts from Schaller <http://www.schallerconsult.com/pub/cityinflux.pdf>:
• In the CBD, there are 138,000 parking places on the street for 810,000 cars • Drivers searching for a metered space constituted 15% of vehicle miles traveled in Midtown west of 5 Avenue during the midday period. [Falcocchio 1995] • 28% of motorists interviewed in SoHo were looking for parking, rising to 41% on Saturday afternoons. [Schaller Consulting 2006b] • Motorists searching for parking comprised 45% of vehicles on 7 Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. [Transp. Alternatives 2007]
10 mins is the average search time for metered parking, not free. And the meters have to be fed every 1-2 hours.
Doug