Parking in New York City Really Is Worse Than Ever

No, you’re not imagining it: Parking in New York City is worse than ever.

Topping the list of reasons is the sheer number of cars: There are over 2.2 million registered in New York City, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and many more that drive into the city each day from elsewhere. Many of them are now vying for the city’s roughly three million free parking spots.

Competing for space by the curb are delivery hubs, bikes and dining sheds, which have chewed away at an estimated 8,000 of the city’s free street side parking spaces. There are now about 2,000 CitiBike bicycle rental docks, and counting. A study of the feasibility of installing rat-resistant garbage dumpsters by the Department of Sanitation showed such containers could claim another 150,000 spaces if implemented.

There is also a peculiarly New York parking conundrum: So much of the city’s street parking is free (and meter parking is relatively cheap) that drivers park and just stay put, said Rachel Weinberger, the director of research strategy at Regional Plan Association; cars are not incentivized to budge. This month, the city will roll out higher meter prices, beginning in Manhattan, to induce turnover. “It helps people share better,” Ms. Weinberger, said.

All this parking trouble comes at a time when there is an active effort to shrink the number of cars in New York because they contribute so much to climate change. Transit and environmental advocates argue that parking in the city — in garages and on public streets — should be expensive, partly as an incentive to keep people from driving in the first place.

For those desperately in search of a place to leave their cars, the pain is felt citywide. But its apex is perennially car-stuffed Manhattan, where garage parking is the most expensive in the country — on average $441 per month — according to a recent study of nearly 40 big U.S. cities by FINN, a subscription car leasing company. (That’s about what you’d pay for 20 months of parking in Tulsa, Okla., the country’s cheapest, according to the findings.) The Upper West Side’s garages are the most expensive of all, it found, averaging $650 a month.