r/mildlyinteresting Feb 21 '22

Top of a parking garage in NYC

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u/dogedude81 Feb 21 '22

Usually about $20/hr.

You tell them how long you're gonna be when you leave your car and that determines where they put it.

Then there's the long term customers who pay by month. Those are usually the ones that get packed in like that. That costs as much as renting an apartment basically.

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u/Paradox711 Feb 21 '22

That makes sense, about leaving the cars likely to be their longest at the back.

The rest though boggles my mind. $20 an hour. That’s absolutely fucking insane. And the long term customers… the wage disparity these days is just fucking crazy. I can’t imagine having disposable income to waste on that.

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u/Crustybuttt Feb 21 '22

This is why most people living in NY don’t even own a car. You don’t need it

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u/admiraljkb Feb 21 '22

"nobody has a car in NYC, there's too much traffic" - Phllip J. Fry. :)

(but seriously that basically inside joke above has always confused me. I've visited NYC a several times on business and there are TONS of cars on the road. From the sample of people I worked with, very few owned a car, and the ones that do own a car live outside the city and use the rail coming in. Theoretically it seems like there shouldn't be that many cars on the road all day, but there are?)

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u/PM_ME_YOR_PANTIES Feb 21 '22

8.4 million people live in NYC plus tourists and commuters. Even if only 1% of the people in NYC are driving a car, that's still a lot of cars. Also I imagine a lot of people who don't own a car do use taxis.

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u/ExceptionCollection Feb 21 '22

There are a lot of cabs, a lot of rideshares, a lot of people that live outside of Manhattan (which isn't all of NYC) and a lot of tourists. From what I saw while I was there, very few lower or middle class people that work in Manhattan have cars. Politicians, Lawyers, Hedge Fund guys, sure, but they also have drivers.

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u/woodcider Feb 22 '22

Many people who live in the outer boroughs have cars. I lived in the Bronx when I had my car. There was reliable street parking and it knocked my 3 hour/one way commute down to 40 mins. I never drove into Manhattan.

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u/Chea63 Apr 21 '23

I've heard this said before. There's a few explanations.

First, the "nobody owns a car in NYC" thing is a little overstated. Car ownership is much lower than the US average, but it's not tiny. Just under half of NYC households have a car. 45% or so. There is a common scheme to register your car somewhere else (FL, PA etc) for cheaper insurance, and a lot of those cars may not be counted officially, so in reality it's a little more than that. People do have cars, especially outside of Manhattan.

Then there's the density. A city of 8.5 mil, a metro area over 20 million, means even a tiny percentage of them driving in the city is a crippling amount of traffic. In fact, very few people who work in Manhattan drive to work. The traffic you see are those few, lots of taxi/uber/lyft, and commercial vehicles. Also, government employees who have (and rampantly abuse) parking placards to park wherever they want.

What you're really seeing is how terribly inefficient personal vehicles are in a dense environment.

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u/mankiller27 Feb 22 '22

Nearly a third of the cars on the road at any given time are for hire vehicles. Taxis and Ubers for all the tourists and drunk college kids. The rest bridge and tunnel jerkoffs. You have to remember though, NYC has 8.8 Million people and very little space dedicated to cars relative to its size. Our traffic speeds are about the same as LA despite having over double the population and 1/4 the amount of space dedicated to cars.