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A Carshare Pilot Program Is Coming For Your Parking Spots This Fall
By
David Colon
Published Aug 17, 2017
Modified Aug 17, 2017
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via Flickr user Design For Health
By
David Colon
Published Aug 17, 2017
Modified Aug 17, 2017
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We already have bike share and the occasional pirate bike share efforts in New York, and now the concept is getting extended to the bike's natural enemy: the car. The city will begin to set aside parking spots exclusively for the cars of carshare programs this fall, according to the Department of Transportation.
The DOT announced that a pilot program giving 300 on-street parking spots exclusively to carshare cars will be coming to 15 neighborhoods around the city starting in late fall. The neighborhoods in question are:
Boerum Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hill - Carroll Gardens, East Harlem, East Williamsburg, Eastern Rockaways, Hamilton Heights, Jackson Heights, Jamaica, Morningside Heights, Park Slope, Red Hook, Ridgewood, Soundview and Williamsburg
In addition to the on-street parking, 300 parking spots in certain municipal parking lots around the city will be be given to car share cars.
Each spot for on-street parking will be designated for specific car share companies who are participating in the program, though those companies haven't been named yet. The DOT's car share website says that the participating companies will be named at a future date.
The pilot program will last for two years, until 2019, which according to the DOT provides "enough time for residents to adjust their mobility patterns and reassess their car ownership decisions." Following the end of the program, the DOT will determine if the city benefited from carshare programs the way that other cities have, and figure out if the practice has a future in the city. At the moment, cities like Seattle, Philadelphia and Baltimore have programs in which car share companies pay municipal governments for on-street parking spots.
A 2016 study pointed to by Council Member Mark Levine, who sponsored the bill introducing the car share pilot program, found that when Car2Go was introduced in five North American cities, "between 2% and 5% of Car2Go members sold their cars and that between 7% and 10% of members decided not to buy a car."
At the time the bill was being heard by the City Council, Levine told Gothamist that the addition of designated parking spots for carshare cars could make the system attractive enough to spur people who don't use their cars that often to get rid of them. In that way, according to Levine, it would free up parking in the long run.
"The correlation to the reduction in car ownership is much clearer [than with Citi Bike] and therefore I would hope it would be more readily embraced by communities," Levine told Gothamist in December.
If you're interested in preserving your parking spot, or really want to put a carshare parking spot on your block, you can chime in online about where you'd like the spots to go.
Tagged
car share
department of transportation
David Colon
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