Parking in Center City isn’t always easy, and it sure isn’t cheap. Philly has the third-highest cost of parking out of 100 cities around the world, according to a study released this week by Kfzteile24, an online “automotive spare parts and accessories” company headquartered in Berlin, Germany.
To figure out Philly’s average cost of parking for one hour, the research team added up the city’s street and garage parking and calculated the average, which came to a total of $17.19. The team received data from the Philadelphia Parking Authority, but Kfzteile24 spokesperson Ricky Sutton said in an email that finding information about parking in Philadelphia isn’t necessarily easy.
“A smart city should pride itself not in how much it collects in parking tickets, but in how practical and affordable parking is,” Sutton said in an email.
Philadelphians can look at the city’s cost of parking for streets and garages on Parkopedia. But that doesn’t include private parking garages. Sutton said the city could benefit from more transparency in parking costs.
The overall goal of the study was to calculate a ranking that shows the best and worst cities around the world to drive in. The research team used several different factors to come up with a final rank — congestion level, cost of gasoline/diesel, public transportation alternatives, cost of parking, average speed from downtown to the airport, air pollution, road traffic injuries, road quality and road rage.
After calculating the weighted average of those factors, Philly came out at 43rd overall.
But only two cities came back with higher parking costs. New York City’s average cost of parking is $27.61 per hour, and in Sydney, hourly parking costs $26.34, according to the study.
Parking news of the week
PPA tickets may be severely affecting the city’s poorest and blackest residents
Turns out some Philly neighborhoods with poverty rates of 20 percent or more have received 100,000 or more tickets from 2012 to 2016, according to The Philadelphia Citizen and WURD radio host Charles Ellison. By looking at the city’s parking violations data, they found that those highly ticketed areas are usually low-income neighborhoods occupied by mostly black residents. Check out the possible impacts (and solutions), plus info on the neighborhood that received 708,000 parking tickets in four years here.
