By Tony Perez Cassino

A new report issued last week by Transportation Alternatives wants to lift parking requirements on new residential buildings as a means to reduce car use in the city. While that may work in Manhattan, what about boroughs like the Bronx, where residents need their cars to go food shopping or catch a movie? On-street parking will become even harder to find.

You don't have to be an expert in city planning or transportation to know that our city has serious traffic congestion and parking problems. The real challenge is to devise creative solutions to address these growing problems. While that's the goal of a new report issued by Transportation Alternatives and some other public policy organizations, I believe that its recommendations would in fact be counterproductive and potentially disastrous for boroughs like the Bronx.

The report, "Suburbanizing the City: How New York City Parking Requirements Lead to More Driving" - or the "TA Parking Report" - recommends that the city eliminate off-street parking requirements for new residential construction. It goes so far as to recommend that the city reclassify minimum parking requirements as maximums. Essentially, they would like the number of parking spaces provided in a building to be capped based on factors such as proximity to public transportation. The premise of the report is that car ownership and use is being encouraged by the availability of off-street parking in residential buildings. It postulates that "adding parking infrastructure has the same effect as adding road infrastructure. The supply increase serves latent demand, the effect of reducing time cost induces demand."