The Upper West and East sides of Manhattan are set to lose about 10% of their street parking as the city installs new curbside trash containers to get garbage bags off the sidewalks.
A draft environmental assessment published earlier this month shows the two neighborhoods hugging Central Park will each lose about 1,500 parking spaces to the city’s new “Empire Bins” — far more than any other area of the city.
The trash container plan calls for removing up to 29,842 street parking spots across the city by 2032. But the Upper East and West Sides are slated to be at the vanguard of the sanitation department’s battle over street space.
City data shows about 23% of households in the neighborhoods own a car. Street parking is extra competitive in the area.
Upper West Sider Ella Darling was one of those frustrated drivers last week after driving 45 minutes from Hoboken, where she works as a pharmaceutical sales representative, to her home. She couldn’t find a legal space, so ended up parking in a no-parking zone on West 85th Street.
“There's not really any accessible parking for drivers, and it's only getting worse as the city gets more popular,” she said.
Darling said she has paid up to $60 for half an hour of parking in a private lot.
The sanitation department’s environmental study gave little sympathy for Upper West Side car owners like Darling, finding the average car-owning household in the neighborhood would only need to use a garage around 4.4 days a month – amounting to a “relatively modest” $270 a month — an amount the study said most locals could afford.
Darling's car was among 76 parked on the block of West 85th Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues, which has two schools and more than 30 residential buildings. The block could eventually see seven of its spots replaced by around 14 Empire Bins.
The pain for drivers on other blocks nearby could be more acute, with some losing nearly twice as many spots as the city plans to remove for bins on West 85th Street.
Buildings with 31 or more units will be automatically assigned one or more on-street bins, while buildings with 10 to 30 units will be able to opt in to the program and request that one be installed on the street.
The sanitation department and supporters of the plan reject the framing as a loss of parking spots, arguing instead that it is simply the retaking of space that belongs to the public.
“We’re repurposing public space that has traditionally been used for parking so that we have clean streets and sidewalks,” sanitation department spokesperson Vincent Gragnani said.
Councilmember Gale Brewer, who’s represented the Upper West Side in various offices since 2002, has previously sparred with the mayor’s office on efforts to restrict free parking in the neighborhood. But she supported the rollout of the Empire Bins, saying they would be a welcome use of street space.
“It's for a positive purpose,” she said. “Meaning garbage off the streets, hopefully less rats, less smell, cleaner blocks. It's not easy for drivers, but in this case, you have a public good in the parking space."
The war over parking on East 91st Street pins car owners against urban planners who argue there are better uses of public space than free parking.
For Oscar Rivera, 62, who has worked on West 85th Street for 40 years as a building superintendent, any loss of parking would be too much. He said he hoped his retirement would come before the bins get installed in front of his building.
“I hope it happens later, not now, so it's gonna be more work, but I will follow the rules. If I am still strong, I will do it,” Rivera said as he climbed into his car to create space for a neighbor looking for parking.
Raquel Pinderhughes, an urban planner and professor plotting a permanent move back to Manhattan, was eyeing an apartment on the block Wednesday. She said she’d welcome the bins even if it made parking more of a hassle.
"I think when you first see these large bins on your street, your immediate thought is that parking spaces have been lost, and that comes as difficult information to process,” she said. "But within a very short period of time, you get accustomed to the visual trash bin itself. And one does have a more comforting feeling that the garbage is gonna be inside of a trash bin, and that we're gonna reduce some of the rodent problems."
The sanitation department will host a hearing on the plan on July 28.
