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February 6, 2008
Forum Brings Out Complexities Of Traffic and Parking Issues
There Are Simply Too Many Cars
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
By Dennis Holt
The conventional widsom among transportation geeks is that Brooklyn gets screwed if Atlantic Yards happens without congestion pricing, and that Brooklyn gets screwed if congestion pricing happens without implementing a residential parking permit plan.
One Atlantic Yards supporter reports from a local meeting:
Much of the detailed conversation surprised most of the audience, because for the first time it became known that this rather dimly understood concept was being carefully studied by the city’s Department of Transportation as part of the New York City Study plan for 2030.
At the meeting, one of several planned by the DOT, two distinct postulates were advanced: There cannot be a congestion policy adopted without selective residential parking permits, and there is most likely a need for a residential parking policy even if there is no congestion pricing adopted.
The latter is certainly the case in the Downtown Brooklyn area. Advocates and experts all agreed that the major development projects in the area from Brooklyn Bridge Park to Atlantic Yards and everything in between demanded a thoughtful study of parking patterns.
NoLandGrab: "A thoughtful study of parking patterns" should have been included in the Atlantic Yards Environmental Impact Study.
For example, according to the EIS, 35% of on-street parking spaces within 1/4-mile of the project site are available during the 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. hour (1,930 of 5,590 spaces). Yet a field survey conducted by the Department of Transportation last month for that agency's recent parking workshops found that a mere 2% of the 2,660 residential (non-metered) spaces it studied in the vicinity of the Atlantic/Flatbush/4th Avenue nexus were vacant at 6 p.m. If both sets of numbers are to be believed, that would mean that 62% of the spaces not studied by DOT would have to be vacant at 6 p.m.
Do you know any neighborhoods near the Atlantic Yards footprint with on-street parking conditions like that? We didn't think so.
Posted by lumi at February 6, 2008 4:42 AM