Don Shoup had proposed the idea in a Times op-ed in 2018, noting that the city’s three million on-street spaces were 97 percent free and covered 6 percent of New York’s land mass. Seventeen square miles of land. Thirteen Central Parks. Pricing just half those spaces at $5.50 a day, Shoup calculated, would raise an astounding $3 billion a year, enough to bond a new subway line. The $5.50 number was not incidental—that was the cost of a round-trip subway fare.
