How Does This Even Sound Right?
Recently, Mayor Bloomberg proposed a green initiative to remove 40% of parking spots from 1,800 of the city’s municipal lots and garages to make room for private car-sharing services such as ZipCar. (Full Article)
First of all, Zipcar is a bit of a scam, and false advertisement. With my personal experiences… I’ve always needed a car for more than 6 hours to run two errands in the City. Yes In the city, due to traffic and crap, it’s almost impossible to rent a car for ..what….4 hours or less? And trust me, I’m a very skilled driver and even I can’t cut down my time by that much. So with this Zipcar thing, even I got pulled in by their BS advertisements of $7/hr (YEAH RIGHT!) Apparently being in NYC, there’s no cars available that is under the $11/hr (weekday) and $13/hr (weekends) mark. Comparing Zipcar to Enterprise for a day’s rent, Enterprise is actually cheaper by 8 – 10 dollars give or take.
Back to the article … I think Bloomberg really doesn’t understand and is trying to pull this green initiative bullshit that will end up screwing people up. Oh, and I doubt he uses ZipCar on an occasional basis, because I’m sure he owns his own car (s?) and has his own parking space. I’ve recently moved to Astoria and really witness how cars and parking spaces are actually very valuable (life lines) for the working class families here. It’s much more important than Manhattan in the sense that everything is much more dispersed and there’s a huge lack of taxis when you need one; to get to one destination is actually much more effort than in Manhattan. If anything, Bloomberg should start in Manhattan because you really don’t need a car in Manhattan.
Maybe I might be understanding it in a different way but the wrong part in this is that thes parking spaces will be handed to this private car rental/sharing enterprise. LOL ok, so getting rid of 40% of the parking spots won’t be for a new park, or some public clinic or school (as examples), but no it’ll get handed to ZipCar, for THEIR cars, so they can make money. LOL it’s not like the people who’s been regularly parking there with their own cars, will give up and trash their cars if the space is given to Zipcar too. They’ll just find somewhere else and it’ll be a smack in the face for the residents. Doesn’t make sense Bloomberg. Not only that, I doubt 75% of the people in Astoria alone can afford to become members with Zipcar to start, let alone renting and actually using it. Of course people will be outraged.
