I’ve lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, since 1982. It’s one of New York’s prettiest residential neighborhoods, and generally has a lot going for it: Prospect Park, great restaurants, good schools, beautiful Victorian architecture, a wonderful library, convenient subways, concerts at the Bandshell, and so on. It’s been a great place to raise two kids, and all of us who live here know we’re into a good thing.
There’s one fly in the ointment, though: parking is hell.
It wasn’t so bad when the lovely Nina and I first moved here, in a previous age of the world, but sometime back in the 1990’s every young couple in New York City suddenly realized what an agreeable place Park Slope is, and they all decided to move here at once. New residential buildings sprang up, old single-family brownstones occupied by superannuated Italian and Irish women with blue hair and rumpled housecoats were converted to multiple-unit dwellings, and the population swelled rapidly. (The distaff side of the population swelled rapidly also, leading to oft-mentioned complications with stroller-gridlock, but that’s another story.)
Nowadays (according to an article I read in the Times last year but am too lazy to go dig up right now), close to half the cars driving around the neighborhood at any given time are looking for parking. If you get home from a long trip at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, your journey has just begun. I have literally spent hours at a time late at night, circling and circling, in a suffocating black vortex of existential despair and impotent rage.
Problems like this cry out for clever solutions, and yesterday I got an email from a man who may have one. His name is Dan Robinson, and you can see his proposal here.
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If you hear a fire-alarm in the near future, Please “Ignore it,”