By Dennis Holt
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

BROOKLYN HEIGHTS — About 150 to 200 people spent more than two hours Monday night at St. Francis College hearing advocates and experts talk about residential permit parking.

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.

(Hanging in the air, but never addressed, was the thought that maybe Downtown Brooklyn needs its own congestion pricing policy in addition to residential parking approaches: After all, it is the third largest business district in the city.)

Many in the audience realized for the first time that establishing a residential permit parking policy is not a simple matter of signs and enforcement; that it is a complicated process involving pricing policies, street locations and effects on contiguous neighborhoods.

Concern over the latter was underscored by a contingent from Windsor Terrace, with T-shirts made for the occasion that argued against Downtown-area permit parking because it could lead to a traffic overflow in their neighborhood.

Among the three Brooklyn City Councilpersons at the meeting (David Yassky, Letitia James and Bill de Blasio), de Blasio may have uttered a phrase that will be widely repeated: “When thinking about where to put in permit parking, maybe we should follow the subways.�

The DOT will conduct detailed studies of parking issues in seven areas in the city, having already performed two in the Downtown area, one involving Brooklyn Heights, Boerum Hill and part of Fort Greene and the other involving Prospect Heights.

Both of those studies showed a consistent pattern: Anywhere from 40 percent to 48 percent of the autos parked on residential streets during weekday hours did not belong to residents of those neighborhoods, but to commuters of some kind.

This is the reality that drives both residential permit parking and congestion pricing. It is an old cliché but is more true than ever: There are simply too many cars on our streets, making those streets dysfunctional and making our air even worse.

Also emerging is another truth, which this week’s meeting in Brooklyn Heights helped to promote: There is a need for congestion pricing in certain areas, but only if accompanied by selective residential permit parking, and there is a place for permit parking in certain areas even if there is no congestion pricing. One can almost foresee the classic guy standing in an alley entry with fedora and trench coat and the trench coat open to reveal a layer of pockets: The guy is saying, “Pssst … want to buy a parking permit, cheap?�

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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