You know what's most amazing about this? Who are these people that they can get in their cars at 9am and stick around until 11am? Are they housewives? Do they have their kids in the car with them? Are they businessmen? Does that mean that NYC businesses essentially has an unspoken agreement that on Tuesday (or whatever), people don't have to come in until 11 or later? I see this on my street too, although there people usually tend to idle on the side being street cleaned until the truck comes, at which point they momentarily move to the other side.

I also received this note from a regular reader:

Based on review of 16 mostly American and European studies of cruising conducted between 1927 and 2001, Shoup concludes that cars searching for free parking contribute to over 8% of total traffic. The relevant New York City study was conducted in 1995 by John Falcocchio, Joe Darsin and Elena Prassas.  They concluded the average time drivers took to find a curb space between 8 and 10 a.m. was 7.3 minutes, increasing to 10.6 minutes between 11a.m. and 2 p.m.  According to their research, cruising for curb parking created about 8 percent of the total vehicle miles traveled in west Midtown.

Read more at the Tri-State Transportation Campaign

I wonder about "parking deregulation."

Selling off parking spaces to private companies would raise huge funds for the city, would reduce or eliminate free parking, and would (with the "deregulation" frame) delight the free-market fundamentalist right currently in power.

Perhaps drivers could be told that companies, with incentive to compete, would  likely offer services to parking consumers which the city cannot -- like shoveling out snowed-in cars, or reparking services when street cleaning happens.  (Such lies are used to sell deregulatory policies in general.)  

Meanwhile, parking is much more difficult and car use in the city goes down.

Eh?

Funny you should mention this - when I was coming in this morning, I saw a variation of the dance and it started me thinking.

As a DSNY sweeper approached, 3 idling cars pulled away from the curb and parked in the middle of the street at an angle, blocking all other traffic - they waited for the sweeper to pull in to the curb and pass, and then did a Blue Angels type maneuver to'ing and fro'ing until the three in a synchronized ballet movement backed into the orignal spaces, allowing traffic to flow again - but continuing to idle for the remainder of their time.  Did I mention the horns?

In its own way it had a certain beauty, but it made me want to reach for a gun (not that I have one).  I own a car and I pay a small ransom to have it garaged, and I'm paying another small ransom in taxes so these drivers can waste and pollute and raise the hackles of other drivers (the horns and the tension were both apparent).  There oughta be a law.

I should also note that this was on Fifth Avenue, and the drivers were not local residents - at least the cars didn't look like it, and those spaces are usually empty late at night - but rather those who have commuted to the area for work, one to a car.  This is a different situation from the block you wrote about, and underscores the need for a rational restriction on one-person-to-a-car traffic into the City.

btw, PLEASE USE SMALLER jpgs - each appears to be over 2 Megs, they take FOREVER to load, and you're wasting bandwidth, which is costing TOD on every load of the page - each pix is like 2x2 inches on the page, yet 2.3megs x 8 = ~20megs each time the page loads - perhaps you can replace them with something a little more economical in usage of these expensive and rare resources

In my old town, people can request that their neighborhood requires 'paid parking'. So if you want to park, it is usually something like 1-2$ per hour, and the residents get 1 licence for cheap. If they want more licences per household, the next one is much more expensive. And you also get one for visitors. You know, one with a disk which is only good for a few hours, or a booklet of stamp like tickets that you can use up.

But you have to organize your neighborhood into 'one voice', although that is usually not so difficult if there is a real parking problem.

When the city center introduces paid parking, the next ring will end up with a lot of free-loaders so to speak. So they are the first to request this. Then the next ring does the same. It sakes several years to stabilize it.

But this is in Europe, in the US, things are different.