Here's the math on what the other ~92% could be worth, the map of what's metered and how peer cities price their curbs.
New York City has roughly a million genuinely parkable curb spaces. About 85,000 — just 8% — are metered, generating roughly $258 million a year. The rest are free. (Older estimates put the curb count as high as 2.9 million to 3 million, but most of that curb can't actually hold a parked car — see below.) Adjust the sliders below to model what different pricing structures could raise.
Free overnight street parking in New York City dates to 1954, when the city began allowing drivers to store cars on public streets at no charge. At the time only 43% of city households owned a car, and those households had above-average incomes. Car ownership in New York is still roughly that low today, but it no longer tracks income in a simple way: it is concentrated among middle-income and very-high-income households, while many of the city's wealthiest residents are deliberately car-free. Before 1954 the New York Times had proposed an annual parking tax of $60 — roughly $550 in today's dollars.
Economist Donald Shoup has argued that free curb parking generates excess traffic, raises the cost of housing and that the market value of the land devoted to free parking in the U.S. may exceed the value of all the cars parked on it. At the same time, car owners in New York City value free parking precisely because owning a car here is already expensive and often inconvenient — and many people, including families, residents with mobility issues and workers with difficult commutes or odd-hour shifts, genuinely depend on private vehicles.
The policy questions here are not just "parkers versus everyone else." They are also tradeoffs within the parking world. A residential-permit fee would cost current parkers money — but in exchange it would push out commuters from other neighborhoods, vehicles with out-of-state plates and people using the curb as long-term car storage, making spots dramatically more available and reliable on permit blocks. For many residents, paying a modest monthly fee for a near-guaranteed spot is a better deal than paying nothing to circle for 20 minutes after work.
How do you get from the headline number to a parkable one? The Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program (chaired by Sam Schwartz, directed by Kelly McGuinness) started from the city's street network — about 6,000 centerline miles of non-arterial city streets, or roughly 11,000 miles of curb — and assumed 20 feet per car to get a gross count of about 2.9 million spaces. It then subtracted the curb that can't or shouldn't hold a parked car. What remains is roughly a million genuinely available spaces. The waterfall below uses their conservative Digital City Map column.
The Schwartz team stresses these are approximations — a more rigorous geospatial pass could refine them — but the direction is clear: the popular 2.9 million figure overstates parkable curb by a factor of more than 2.5. A parallel "Google estimates" column in their workbook, built from Google's slightly higher street mileage, lands at ~1,132,000 available spaces; we use the lower, more conservative Digital City Map figure (~1,028,000) for every revenue scenario on this page. Source: Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program, memo and workbook to Vital City, June 11, 2026.
Not all of that curb is alike. Metered zones make sense for commercial corridors, transit hubs and high-traffic streets — the kinds of blocks where drivers circle for spots and turnover matters. Today's ~85,000 meters are concentrated in Manhattan below 96th Street, downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City and commercial strips in the Bronx and Staten Island. Expanding metering to all major commercial and mixed-use streets citywide could cover a few hundred thousand spaces.
Residential permits target a different problem: the vast majority of parkable curb sits on neighborhood streets, occupied overnight and on weekends by local residents. These spaces — on the order of 800,000 to 1 million in the Schwartz estimate — are less likely candidates for hourly meters, but a modest permit fee could generate revenue, encourage some drivers to park off-street, discourage unnecessary car ownership and deter commuters from storing cars in residential neighborhoods.
Metering and residential permits are not mutually exclusive: a city could meter commercial streets and offer residential permits on others. A growing number of cities now blend the two strategies on the very same blocks — a "pay and permit" model. Residents park on their annual permit, while non-residents can buy a few hours at an hourly rate during the day, so a quiet residential curb earns money from visitors without displacing the people who live there. Paris, much of London and many U.S. cities run some version of this hybrid.
The calculator below offers two ways to model the math: a quick estimate built on a single average fee, and a detailed model that splits the curb between metered and permit blocks and prices each side separately.
The back-of-envelope version. The city has about a million parkable curb spaces, and roughly 92% of them are free. Charging an average of just $35 per space per week — about $5 a day, less than a single round-trip subway fare — could generate around $2 billion a year. Adjust the fee and how much of the free curb it covers; framing it as a small daily or weekly amount keeps the number intuitive.
The fuller version. First decide how much curb stays free, then split the priced curb between metered blocks and residential-permit blocks. Tune each side separately — metering and permits target different streets and can run at the same time.
This calculator is a rough modeling tool, not a precise forecast. All figures are estimates.
Parkable-space estimate: Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program, memo and workbook to Vital City, June 11, 2026 (analysis of the New York City Department of City Planning Digital City Map, October 2025 release). Meter location data: NYC Open Data, Parking Meters Locations and Status. Street centerline data: NYC Open Data, Centerline.
First, a clarification: New York City's roughly $258 million in parking-meter revenue goes into the city's general fund — it does not currently fund the MTA. But it makes a useful yardstick: it equals just 1.3% of the MTA's $19.9 billion operating budget. The charts below show where MTA money actually comes from and how a priced-curb program — whether the city kept the money or dedicated it to transit — would stack up against those sources.
"Reducing the government subsidy" is abstract. Here is what priced-curb revenue could pay for instead — riders would feel each of these directly. Every figure is an approximate annual cost; compare them against the combined number from the calculator's detailed model.
The MTA's $19.9 billion operating budget is funded by a mix of fares, dedicated taxes, tolls and government subsidies — parking meters are not among them. Pick a calculator scenario to drop in a hypothetical priced-curb slice and see how it would compare with the MTA's real revenue sources if the city dedicated that money to transit.
Fares cover roughly 35% of operating costs, down from more than 50% before the pandemic. The average NYC Transit trip costs about $5.63 to provide; riders pay about $1.97 on average (once unlimited passes and reduced fares are blended in). The rest is subsidy.
The MTA's 2025-2029 capital plan covers system rebuilding and expansion but has a significant funding gap.
Fare evasion costs the MTA roughly $1 billion a year — nearly four times the level of parking meter revenue.
New York City leaves roughly 92% of its parkable curb free. Most global peers charge significantly more — through meters, permits, congestion fees or outright ownership requirements. Here's what the data shows.
One way to see the New York bargain: spread the city's $258 million in meter revenue across all ~1.1 million parkable curb spaces — including the ~92% that are free — and the average space earns the city about $230 a year, or roughly 64 cents a day. A single private garage space in Manhattan rents for hundreds of dollars a month. A fuller comparison would also normalize each city's rates by local incomes — which would make New York's giveaway starker still; that income-adjusted view is a planned addition to this page.
All figures converted to USD at approximate March 2026 exchange rates (1 GBP = $1.29, 1 EUR = $1.08, 1 AUD = $0.63, 1 SGD = $0.76). Revenue figures are from the most recent available fiscal year for each city and may span different reporting periods.