Rafiki Rafiki Rafiki said:
I'm always amazed when I talk to or meet people from New York who don't have their own cars.
Here in the South, we have no public transportation system to speak of...even in larger cities you almost never see a bus. Cabs are unheard of. There are no trains.
I can't imagine having to depend on my city the way New Yorkers do.
It's very expensive and can be very inconvenient to have a car in NYC.
Up here in the Bronx, we pay $170 (including 10.75% tax) monthly to garage our car. It's about TRIPLE that for monthly parking in the city (Manhattan) especially since the tax in the city is over 20%!!! So, monthly parking in a garage in the city (approx. $400-600) is more than rental housing in some other parts of the country.
And we haven't even added the costs of gas, maintenance, and INSURANCE to the costs of owning a car yet!
The only alternative to paid garage parking is on the street parking. Have you ever tried to find parking in NYC? Try doing that every day! Even if you find a good space, in most places, you have to move your car every day for the street sweepers to go through and go through the parking search again.
Even if you are lucky or unlucky enough to own a car, as many of the people in the suburbs do, you would never drive it to work. There are NO street parking in the business and financial districts. You would have to park it in a parking lot, assuming you can find one not FULL, at $18 + 20% tax for ONE hour!!! There is a max that they can charge per day and I think it is around $50-60?
We're too cheap to pay for parking in the city. So, when we go there on the weekends or off-peak, we usually add about an hour to the drive to try to find parking in the residential areas of Manhattan.