Jackson Heights Life

I never thought i'd have to talk about this, as i've been anti car for as long as I can remember, but due to having a child and not particularly interested in getting around by train otherwise, we bought a car at the first height of the pandemic.

as a result of owning said car, it turns out you have to park it as well. it hasn't exactly been a treat, but over the course of the last few months, i've observed a lot of the terrible parking trends in the area. for anyone that drives, i'm not sure its necessary to get into them, but I have a solution and wondered if anyone knew the proper channels to go about working this out, hopefully to everyone's benefit.

a couple years ago we spent time in LA, downtown to be exact, and I recall getting a ticket within hours of being in the area, because we didn't park between boundary lines that were painted on the streets. obviously in the moment i hated it, but if we had said lines here (and i'm sure a lot of places in the city) it would stop a lot of the ridiculous parking that goes on, thus likely opening up more potential spots, and also (i hope) curbing the unnecessary floating around the neighborhood for parking, which helps with unecessary pollution, gas usage, etc.

anyone have any beef with this as an idea? i personally can't see the downside but it wouldn't be life without opposition.

Any politician trying to charge for over night on-street parking in the boroughs will never be re-elected and the party supporting that would have a hard time surviving. They can't even charge tolls on the old East River bridges without being threatened with being run out of town. That's why they hide the parking fees in gas and sales and taxes and registration and licensing fees.  Don't you remember when they had to back down from Sunday parking meter fees?

The resolution to eliminating parking stress from your life is to rent a parking space. I lived here more than 15 years, to fall 2017, before finally capitulating.  About that time it got REALLY IMPOSSIBLE.  We could not drive car on Saturday night as there would be NO space upon return.  We take public transit whenever possible, but attribute this expense to a "cost of living" a livable life. Friends say that between parking space and insurance we would pay less to simply get an Uber whenever we did not want to take public transit, but we want the car at hand so are biting the economic bullet. 
By the way, I recently did a car insurance review among several companies and learned that what I thought was too much to pay Geico for the 810 miles we drove the past 12 months is $500 less than any other company. 

Anyone who doesn't need a car daily for work shouldn't own one.  Between ownership, maintenance, parking, and liability costs, only fools would own a vehicle as it is way less expensive to take black cars.  The best part is you can drink, drive, and nap.

Rice, I just wanted to take the time to say thank you for the advice no one asked you for. I'll make sure to throw away my car and start taking black cars to our house upstate.

I was recently in Montreal and they have a great system here. Half the spots on each block are open, half are restricted to people with resident permit stickers. The resident permit areas each appear to be quite small, so people only have stickers for the area close to their homes. You can also buy a daily resident permit sticker for $6/day at a bodega. It's a lovely balance between free parking, paid parking and resident parking. There is also a network of municipal paid lots which appear to be near shopping areas, like if we had a municipal lot right off Roosevelt (WHICH WE SHOULD.)

They also have alternate side parking for street cleaning like we do, btw.

In the downtown they have marked spaces like jo3boxer says and Montrealers have the same range of car sizes that New Yorkers do, nobody seems to have a problem.

I have never been able to understand why NYC doesn't have resident only parking at least in some locations. What's the argument -against- resident permits?

that is a great idea. and i would live to see it tried here.

Montreal also has a fantastic recycling program. the public receptacles are larger than ours -- though not huge -- and are divided into four sections, one for paper, one for glass, one for metal and one for refuse. people there seem to understand how to do it.

I have never been able to understand why NYC doesn't have resident only parking at least in some locations. What's the argument -against- resident permits?

I believe Forest Hills Gardens has had permit parking for years and probably some other areas do too. It's widespread in LA, where it  works as intended. I certainly wish we had it in Jackson Heights.

I didn't know that, thanks for posting. Looking around briefly online it seems that permit parking has been suggested or considered in various areas of the city but not (as far as I can tell) implemented anywhere, which is unfortunate. A test somewhere might be worthwhile.