Car city

By AMANDA GLODOWSKI

Micah Wilson was a public-transit enthusiast. He used to ride the subway three times per day in addition to having memberships with Car2Go and CitiBike. Last year, however, he did something out of character.

"I more or less made an impulse purchase," said Wilson, who works in marketing. "I Slacked my wife one day, saying, 'I just bought a car.'"

Wilson isn't alone. New York City is on track for a 34% uptick in new vehicle registrations this year. The number of new learner's permits issued this year has already far surpassed prepandemic annual figures. In tandem, automobile-related businesses including dealerships and car washes are applying for permits at a rapid and growing pace across the five boroughs.

New York is becoming a car city. The implications of the trend are far-reaching, with consequences that cut to the core of how residents live and work. Just a slight shift in New Yorkers choosing to drive rather than take mass transit would change the face of the city. The reverberations could impact everything from how we spend our time to economic mobility and the climate crisis.

The evidence of the shift to cars is overwhelming, a Crain’s review of multiple data sources shows. A few highlights:

• More cars are crowding city streets. The city is on track to add 538,330 newly registered vehicles this year—a 34% increase from last year—according to the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

• Bridge and tunnel traffic has recovered. A daily average of more than 900,000 vehicles used the city's bridges and tunnels in July and August, just 4% below prepandemic times.

• More New Yorkers plan to drive. As of the end of July, the DMV issued 242,871 learner's permits—required precursors to a license—to New Yorkers, a 25% increase from the 2019 total. The pace suggests a year-end increase of 144%.

• Car-related businesses are proliferating. Entrepreneurs are applying for more permits for garages, used-car dealerships and car washes with the Department of Consumer Affairs. And an increasing number of car dealerships and vehicle repair shops are applying for license renewal with the DMV.

• Subway traffic is way down. A little more than 2 million riders per day are making use of the trains, about half the prepandemic numbers.

• More people are paying for parking. The number of drivers going into the city for one-off occasions is steadily inching back to prepandemic levels. Last month there was a 2% increase in transient parkers, compared with July 2019. In July 2020 there was an 88% increase in monthly bookings compared with July 2019. Arrive, a parking technology company, says monthly parking passes are driven by increased car ownership and are a strong indicator that passholders plan to commute regularly.

Charles Komanoff, a New York–based transit economist who created a traffic-modeling tool used to evaluate congestion pricing, estimates that if just one in 10 prepandemic mass-transit travelers switched to cars, it would result in a 45% increase in vehicle volume in the central business district, gridlocking traffic, slowing deliveries and lowering the quality of life.

"The real catastrophe is the incredible loss of time," said Komanoff, who directs the Carbon Tax Center, a New York nonprofit that advocates for taxing carbon emissions. "It goes against the functioning of our metropolis. If it's going to take you 50 minutes to go five miles in a car, that's going to be a death knell to New York City."

More cars on the road also means more city buses "snarled in traffic, said Danny Pearlstein, policy and communications director for the Riders Alliance, a group that advocates for public transportation.

Pearlstein said that with 66% of bus riders hailing from low-income communities and communities of color, "the most inequitable impact of the car boom is the deterioration of bus service."

The drop in subway riders also could starve the MTA, resulting in less reliable service and scuttling planned upgrades. The MTA's debt reached $38 billion last year. Unreliable service, the Covid-19 pandemic and an uptick in crime have kept riders from refilling their MetroCards.

Historically, an affordable and reliable subway system has been one of the great drivers of upward mobility in the city.

"If you get into a situation where if the quality of service starts to decline, there's a self-fulfilling prophecy," said analyst Aaron Renn, author of The Urban State of Mind. "With fewer riders, there will be more service cuts."

Smelling opportunity

Businesses that serve car owners are moving to take advantage of the trend. Edwin Soyfer, chief executive of The Car Guys, a dealership on Staten Island, saw the writing on the pavement as soon as the coronavirus hit, and he quickly filed for a license to expand his car dealership to include secondhand vehicles.

"The first thing we noticed right away was people from Manhattan calling us with the same story: They didn't want to get on the subway, or they wanted to get out to the suburbs," Soyfer said.

So far 185 new parking lots and garages have filed for a business license with the Department of Consumer Affairs this year—putting the city on pace to add 317 by the end of the year, a 125% increase.

The profile of customers reserving advanced parking spaces online has shifted, said Dan Roarty, president and chief operating officer at Chicago-based Arrive, a parking technology company that partners with garages across the city and sells parking reservations on the ParkWhiz and BestParking apps and websites. They aren't just selling to Connecticut or New Jersey residents purchasing monthly passes for daily commutes; New Yorkers are popping in for meetings or one-time events.

One garage owner, Centerpark, converted an Upper East Side garage into a car condominium and is selling 23 parking spaces for as much as $350,000 each.

Meanwhile, more New Yorkers are getting their driver's license. The DMV has added road-test hours in the city to help meet demand for those trying their hand at parallel parking. Driving schools are struggling to keep up with the influx of new students.

"We've been backed up for months trying to shoehorn new lessons into an already tight schedule," said Alexander Murphy, an office administrator at the Professional Driving School of the Americas in the Flatiron District. "A lot of people in New York never really had a reason to drive, and now it's becoming a much more attractive option."

Drive time

Some new drivers don't mind the threat of traffic. Prepandemic, Lauren Dowe used public transportation, taking the Metro-North, a shuttle and two subway lines five days each week from Bronxville to her office in Lower Manhattan. She twice was harassed on the subway and, she said, she grew to dread getting on public transportation.

When Dowe's office closed temporarily because of the pandemic, she was relieved, she said, and she started plotting how she would get back to the office when the time came.

"The choice to drive was easy," she said.

She has no plans to ditch her new navy blue Mazda when her workplace reopens. Either she will wake up at 5 a.m. or try to negotiate a later start time, she said, to miss rush-hour traffic. If all else fails, Dowe, who works in advertising, vows to endure a four-hour daily commute rather than take the train again. Sitting in traffic would just be more time for her to catch up on true-crime podcasts, she reasoned.

New car owners are discovering that the benefits of having a vehicle in the city go beyond the commute. Wilson, the transit enthusiast who now drives, said he and his wife, Erica, in April 2020 began to look for ways to escape their 800-square-foot apartment on the weekends to ride their road bikes and visit friends who had moved to the suburbs. The couple made finding a spot to park their Audi A4 Allroad a top priority in their apartment hunt. They eventually moved to Red Hook, and they stow the car in a dedicated outdoor spot.

Car today, gone tomorrow?

Not everyone is convinced New Yorkers' newfound love of cars will be long-lasting. Dan Doctoroff, chief executive at Sidewalk Labs, a consulting company that works with developers to reimagine cities, views the trend as a Covid-fueled blip.

"A seemingly growing desire for people to have cars is not a sustainable battle at the end of the day," said Doctoroff, who served as deputy mayor for economic development under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The city could make a dent in its growing traffic problem using a number of strategies, according to Doctoroff, starting with congestion pricing. The policy would levy hefty tolls when drivers enter Manhattan below 61st Street, funneling as much as $1 billion in proceeds annually to the MTA. The proposal won support from President Joe Biden's administration in March, but the MTA has not worked out details of the program.