Ironically I believe you may be missing the true point you're making - the reason why there's no parking for commercial vehicles who need to be in that area, is that the streets are absolutely just chock full of various individuals' private property - street parked cars. If you got rid of those street parking spots for individuals, (IE, 'cars are bad make things harder for cars') there would be plenty of space for commercial vehicles to do their jobs, and the problem we're discussing would be solved.
A great solution to this sort of thing is common in the rest of the world, pedestrian-first streets that are permeable to vehicular traffic, offer unstructured temporary parking for necessary uses but does not offer structured overnight street parking for individuals and have a ~15mph limit. Perfect for getting the plumber's van to the front door of properties on such a street.
Now, that street is at the maximalist end of this idea, on most NYC streets you could delete maybe 25% of the street parking for individuals and there'd be plenty of room for plumbers. Also for garbage collection units (to address the rat problem), bicycle parking, al fresco dining, etc.
The urbanist philosophy you are denigrating isn't that cars are 'bad.' The idea is that they're fine in many contexts, they're just wildly inefficient when being used by too many individual persons in a dense urban environment, such as most of NYC.
I would also add along these lines - the changes you perceive as purely punitive to drivers probably make life better for everyone in the city, with a cost to only (some) drivers. Something to think about.
> Perfect for getting the plumber's van to the front door of properties on such a street.
Not exactly. If the speed limit is so low and the path is full of pedestrians, getting there will take a lot longer. Then you're paying a skilled worker to spend more time driving and less time working, on the way in and the way out, to each job multiple times a day.
Not parking in a parking structure several blocks away isn't infeasible because it's physically impossible to put a job box on wheels and lug it down the street, it's infeasible because you can't get it there in a timely manner, which is exactly what this hasn't solved.
And you have a nice idyllic picture of the lone van, but in practice a city block full of skyscrapers will have plumbers and electricians and HVAC technicians and IT staff carrying in computers and things, delivery trucks for everything from packages of dog food and copier paper to appliances to restocking convenience stores and vending machines.
That's what the parking spaces are for, and they're already scarce before you remove any.
What you do to solve that problem is you cross those ped oriented thoroughfares with some higher capacity auto roads, so that the plumber doesn't have to make a long trip from the high capacity road to the property on the low capacity one - instead most of their journey is on parallel roadways and they can turn onto a ped superhighway at the last possible moment. Classic road hierarchy design stuff, just one more level of abstraction down than mostly currently in place in NY. It works fine in European supercities, Tokyo is also a good example.
Also, the plumber won't always be making calls to pedestrian superpaths. Keep in mind how I pointed out that a wide 15mph pedestrian superhighway as described is a maximalist idea - but there are many equally maximalist auto superhighways in the city aren't there? (A key difference being no one wants to live near those) In much the same way as smaller auto roads are more permeable to peds than superhighways, smaller ped oriented roads can be more auto-permeable, with say a 25mph limit and limited street parking. This should constitute the bulk of the city. Then finally at the other end of the scale you have the 35mph avenue/boulevard, then the 45mph auto road, then the 65mph superhighway. They can all live in harmony servicing different kinds of traffic at different speeds, a diverse set of path weights creating beautiful overlays of separate cycle, pedestrian, and road traffic networks, something the Netherlands is really good at in particular.
New York is not all skyscrapers - sort of the opposite actually by land area and population. (Approximately 78 percent of New Yorkers do not live in Manhattan) I live in a part of Brooklyn, where there is certifiably plenty of street parking, I never have trouble finding a spot in front of my place. There's a street nearby maybe 5 minutes walk away where I park when I'm pulling a trailer because there's always enough room for it. That street is where tractor trailers park with 53 foot trailers too - if multiple 53 foot trailers can legally park next to my vehicle with a jet ski on a trailer, next to a public park, that is not a scarcity of parking in my eyes. Keep in mind it is these kinds of predominantly residential medium density places, where most people live, where I want to delete parking spaces. Skyscrapers are just not relevant to the urban environment where most people live in NYC. For example it's perhaps a 40 minute walk to the nearest skyscrapers for me, and I'm not even that far out into Brooklyn.
In Manhattan where the very tallest skyscrapers are? That's a whole other ballgame of scale, I agree. It's just the top of the density pyramid of the overall city though and thus occupies a relatively small overall area of it -- I don't think our citywide urbanist strategies should revolve solely around this area - it requires distinct strategies for the absolutely densest core to keep things moving. It should all just be commercial parking only basically. That's hard to actually enforce in practice, so I think the best strategy is to do a congestion charge set at the right level to reduce the number of single occupant commuter type vehicles in the area and correctly price in that cost of doing business in the densest part of the urban core as a charge rather than a fine. As a bonus traffic should improve as well - I'm eager to see what the upcoming lower Manhattan congestion charge pilot does for my blood pressure when crossing Manhattan in a vehicle using Canal street.
> but there are many equally maximalist auto superhighways in the city aren't there?
I don't know about that. Most city highways in the US have a speed limit of 50-55 MPH or less. It's certainly possible to construct roads that allow for higher speeds. Germany has many highways with no formal speed limit and a limit by gentleman's agreement of around triple that.
No one wants to have that literally in their front yard, but many people find it convenient to live within a few blocks of it, and the directly adjacent land is suitable for things like industry and warehouses and high voltage lines and railways, which all have to be somewhere.
> if multiple 53 foot trailers can legally park next to my vehicle with a jet ski on a trailer, next to a public park, that is not a scarcity of parking in my eyes.
Neither is that the place where contractors are racking up parking tickets.
> It should all just be commercial parking only basically.
That doesn't quite work though, does it? Suppose you live there and you're taking home a new kitchen sink from the hardware store, or literally any other heavy object you have to get from wherever it is now to your residence or vice versa. It's not about whether the vehicle is a truck, it's about whether what's in it is too much to carry long distances on foot.
> I think the best strategy is to do a congestion charge
Which then itself becomes a cost of doing business for anyone who can't avoid it, so it gets priced into the cost of trade services etc. even when the customer isn't rich.
Socially it's always better to reduce scarcity than extract rents from it.
> pedestrian superpaths
The reason there is resistance to this is that cars are heavy, so the best place for them is on the ground where you don't need expensive structural support. Whereas pedestrians are light, so you can build pedestrian spaces vertically at much lower expense. Which means there is much more constraint on the space that can be allocated to cars, whereas if you want more space for pedestrians, you can build taller buildings. Which in turn means it makes sense to use the ground level space for the things that it costs more to put higher up.
And if you want pedestrian spaces outside, put them above the road. Build balconies that overhang the street with pedestrian bridges to other buildings at the level of the second story. Have your al fresco dining on the roof -- the view is better from there anyway.
A great solution to this sort of thing is common in the rest of the world, pedestrian-first streets that are permeable to vehicular traffic, offer unstructured temporary parking for necessary uses but does not offer structured overnight street parking for individuals and have a ~15mph limit. Perfect for getting the plumber's van to the front door of properties on such a street.
Here's a random example in Innsbruck, Austria, note how much room there is to park contractor vans in front of the various adjacent buildings: https://maps.app.goo.gl/m2e7AmWFr8hqw9BC9?g_st=ic
Now, that street is at the maximalist end of this idea, on most NYC streets you could delete maybe 25% of the street parking for individuals and there'd be plenty of room for plumbers. Also for garbage collection units (to address the rat problem), bicycle parking, al fresco dining, etc.
The urbanist philosophy you are denigrating isn't that cars are 'bad.' The idea is that they're fine in many contexts, they're just wildly inefficient when being used by too many individual persons in a dense urban environment, such as most of NYC.
I would also add along these lines - the changes you perceive as purely punitive to drivers probably make life better for everyone in the city, with a cost to only (some) drivers. Something to think about.