How Many Parking Spaces in NYC?

On-Street parking regulations are the set by the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT)

DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg testifed on June 12, 2019 before the NYC Council that “We estimate about three million.” when asked how free parking spaces are in NYC.

This testimony was based on a 2.990M internal DOT estimate of parking done based on 2016 data for parking signs and planimetrics blockfaces. This is an estimated count that includes all metered parking, loading zones, and curb that permits unmetered or unregulated parking at least some part of a day. This estimate excludes area in front of fire hydrants and bus stops.

Changes to on-street parking are sourced from DOT project presentations. Where the presentation doesn't contain a specific number of impacted spaces the impact is estimated.

Data sourced from NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) via NYC Open Data of 41 Municipal Parking Facilities

Data sourced from NYC Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) via NYC Open Data Legally Operating Businesses with active licenses.

Data sourced from NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) via NYC Open Data Planimetrics Building Footprints.

Planimetrics records 214,910 Verified garages covering 77.8 million sqft Verified

Parking spaces estimated at 1 parking space for garages under 285 sqft, 2 spaces for garages 286-470 sqft, 3 spaces for garages 471-600 sqft.

Note: Attached garages are not present in this dataset and not estimated.

Data sourced from NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) via NYC Open Data Planimetrics basemap with Parking Lot features.

Planimetrics records 20,714 Verified lots covering 377.7 million sqft Verified

The available spaces in each of 20,714 lots was estimated using 350 sq ft per parking space rounded down to the nearest number of whole spaces per lot. Because this dataset includes an unknown double count of DCA licensed parking lots 46,751 spaces were subtracted from the final estimate.

350sq ft was chosen as the estimated sq ft per space in an average parking lot. For reference an acre lot (43560 sq ft) can fit between 80 and 170 cars in a self-parking style lot which is between 550 sqft - 256 sqft per car. Smaller lots or valet parking lots often achieve a much denser sq ft per parking space.

Parking spaces in driveways are licensed by NYC Department of Buildings (DOB) as part of the Certificate of Occupancy however buildings built before 1938 aren’t required to have a Certificate of Occupancy. Certificate of Occupancy data is also not provided in a NYC Open Data Dataset.

An estimate of 350,000 driveways is based on a guess that there are 1.62 driveways for every detatched garage in NYC, and that each driveway on average has space for two vehicles.

NYC Department of Buildings (DOB) also manages curb cut licenses but complete data on authorized curb cuts is not available in NYC Open Data. DOB issues approximately 250 new curb cut licenses each year based on NYC Open Data of Approved Permits.

Attatched Garages - Houses with an attatched garage are not included in Planimetrics data for detatched garages. This data should (in theory) be available from Department of Buildings Certificate of Occupancy documents, but not all homes have one, and parking doesn't appear to be recorded consistently. Attatched Garages often have a driveway, and often a curb cut (though sometimes they do not have a legal curb cut). Best Guess: 100,000 - 200,000

Private Parking Garages - Private parking garages that do not charge for parking (which would require a DCA License) do not show up in the Planimetrics Parking Lot dataset. These are often resident-only garages or employee-only or city-employee-only garages. This data should (in theory) be available from Department of Buildings Certificate of Occupancy documents.