Tales of Privatization: Goodbye, NYC Parking!

This brief little nugget in the Post today should sound the alarm for all lovers of Freedom and the Free Market: the Department of City Planning is working on a zoning amendment (they have to rezone to do this?) to give away (or sell, more likely?) up to “40 percent of the city’s public lots” to shared-car rental outfits like Zipcar. (Are there other outfits “like” Zipcar? We assume they mean “just Zipcar” really.) So, first they turned Broadway into a ped mall-which is turning out to be actually good for drivers, by the way, as the models of better traffic flow seem to have been correct; then they came for your trans fats and now they’re coming for your cars! (Duly noted: Goldman Sachs is taking Zipcar public; it has not yet turned a profit. But it will, thanks, perhaps, to its new friends in City Hall.) Very little of NYC’s municipal parking, by the way, is in Manhattan.