A coworker told me that when he first moved to the west coast, one trouble/hassle he had was to find a place to park his car because where he lives does not have a parking space.
The city he was talking about is SF in CA, and there is no snow and winter storm there at least.
This makes me wonder: How painful it would be if a person lives in a major city where there will be several winter storms every winter and if he does not have a covered parking space?
According to my coworker (who still lives in SF – those young generation just love to live in a big city no matter what), it could cost several hundreds a month to rent a parking space for a car in any large city.
Does anybody here have any experience with this? Is it very painful if you do not have a covered parking space and if your apartment (in the north part of this country) does not offer such a parking space? How many young people just choose to live without a car because of the cost and hassles of the parking?
Regarding what you do when it snows, you have to brush the snow off… and sometimes shovel some snow away if they plowed part of your parking lot while your car was in it’s space. Most people keep a brush for that purpose in their car, and I always kept a folding shovel as well.
Regarding cost, yes, it is very pricey for any kind of reserved parking (garage or lot) in a large or expensive city. Sometimes apartment buildings offer spaces in addition to their rent. Some people don’t own cars (my kid in DC doesn’t have one, takes buses or the metro or walks everywhere).
Someone living in this situation needs to take the parking cost into account when selecting a place to live. They might decide to give up their car. I feel like some people might store their cars more on the outer edge of a city like New York, and just take it for a weekend or something? Maybe someone in NY can comment on this. Some people just use Zip cars or the equivalent when they need a car, too.
I’m also familiar with Boston. Garage parking is very expensive. If you want to know what happens when it snows (and we had a lot of experience last year!), google “saving parking spaces in Boston”.
The oddest thing, though, is that many New Englanders have garages, but they use them for storage and park the cars outside anyway!
In Manhattan it probably ranges between $500 and $1000 a month depending on where garage is in the city. If you live in a building with its own garage you have to buy your spot if you want to use the building’s garage and those can be well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In NYC, the issue with street parking (if you can find a spot) is that you have to move your car once a week in the middle of the day for street cleaning. And there’s no where to move it, so you have to double-park for 1.5 hours and stay with your car the entire time.
It can be very expensive to park on a monthly basis, depending on location. There are cheap outdoor lots (relatively cheap) but even the are probably in the 400 buck range last I looked, and indoor garage spaces are expensive, the numbers people have cited are accurate IME. If you live in an outer borough of NYC it might be possible to find something cheaper, but in Manhattan forget finding cheap indoor parking. Thing about NYC is that unless you regularly need to drive, like if you are reverse commuting out of the city or go to areas in the city not easily accessed via mass transit (ie the infamous bus and subway zones), you likely would do a lot better renting a zip car when you need it, and other than that walking or taking the subway or buses.
We live in Philadelphia and have one car for our family. We have always parked our car on the street. We have a parking permit for our zone, which allows us unlimited parking. We walk or take public transportation. Often times we use our car in the City. It’s fairly easy to find parking if you know where to look. When it snows we know we need extra time to wipe the snow off of our car. If it’s a bad snow, then my husband will shovel us out. You’d rarely move your car for a few days around a big snow, until it melts and opens up spots. It’s fine. It’s all about what you get used to. My dd16 does not drive or have a licence. None of her friends have on yet. It’s just not a big deal. We will probably insist she get lessons before she heads off to college.
I pay $130 a month for parking with my apartment (underground) in Seattle, but I don’t live right downtown. I do live in a pretty popular area – it has a great “walk score” (91), and is a hub for buses as well. I could see living the Zip car life here, though. I think parking at my D1’s apartment building in DC (near the zoo) is about $150 per month (she doesn’t have a car, but boyfriend does). They are young, he just looks for street parking instead and walks.
The plus is that places like SF have much better mass transit than other places. The goal is to get rid of privately owned vehicles and replace them with public and with things like zip cars or, better yet, bikes.
We live on a private street north of Portland. For the first 12 years in our house, we didn’t have a garage and parked in the driveway. It was a pain, because we needed to get the cars out of the driveway so it could be plowed. If we parked the cars in the street, that messed up the street plowing. We finally built a two-car garage in 2008 - whoo hoo! But then we got a third car after all three kids started driving, so we have the same problem again. Last winter, during a huge snowfall, we drove our Tahoe to a big public lot, figuring we could get through the snow fine. Oops. They hadn’t plowed at all, and I managed to get the truck very, very stuck. DH and I had to do a lot of shoveling! Thank goodness we’ll be back down to two cars soon.
Another thing to remember about parking on the street…and a lot of Boston folks had to deal,with this over this winter.
When there are parking bans, you MUST move your car. Usually there are designated lots to go to like schools…but sometimes it snows before things get cleared.
If your car is in the street during a ban and gets towed…it’s big bucks to get it back.
Chicago parking cost very much depends on location. Our former condo Lake Shore Drive/Lakeview/Lincoln Park is now $245 per month for a garage owned by the building. And that is much cheaper than other neighborhoods a bit closer to downtown. Like Boston, many areas of northside residential Chicago have over night street parking restricted to residents - cars must display a sticker obtained from the Alderman after presenting proof of residence. And, Chicago also has the snow parking bans and requirements to move cars for street cleaning (which I learned the hard way.) We went for years without a car until kids came along…
We live in a city in a single family house. It has a garage that’s so small you can’t open the doors when you drive your car into it. So we don’t use it for car parking. We park one car on the street and one in the driveway. When it snows we put both cars in the driveway and then we shovel them out. Just a cost of living here. Not a big deal.
I live in NYC and I pay market rate to park my car. Every time I take the car in and out I tip the attendants, plus bonus for the holidays. I get them to wash my car for a price. For all of that I get the pleasure of getting a good parking spot so my car wouldn’t get scratched and dinged.
When I first moved back to the city, I didn’t have a car and was using zip car. I really didn’t like it because quite a few times I could get the kind of car I wanted. I have reserved a mini van to move D2 back to school, only to find out the car was not operable and they couldn’t get another mini van for me. More often than not, cars were filthy inside. Sometimes people kept the car longer than expected and I was out of luck.
DS lives in Boston, and parking is a big deal when selecting housing/rentals. He does not own a car - bike, mass transit and Uber work for him. But his housemates have cars, and they are fortunate that rental house includes offstreet parking spots. That does of course make the rental rate higher.