Parking in the city can be a nightmare and it's getting more and more expensive. These ten spots, found by Jalopnik readers, will put your monthly bill in perspective.
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A lot of these spaces have to do with conspicuous consumption as much as they do with a premium on space. The 1% wants to spend as much as it can on its cars, and why would you park a million dollar car in anything less than a million dollar space?
If there is any absurdly expensive parking space we forgot, please let us know in Kinja below. Moreover, (dammit Jim) we're bloggers, not mathematicians, so please correct us if we get any of our calculations wrong.
Photo Credit: Hamilton Parks
10.) London Parking Garage, £14,600/yr
The most expensive public parking garage spot we could find was right in London, where CNN estimates monthly pricing can be as high as $1,084 per month. We found a garage just outside of Trafalgar Square charging £40/day, or £14,600 a year.
Suggested By: 404 Name Not Found, Photo Credit: Swedish Goose
9.) Chicago Airport, $105,761
Certainly the highest ratio of cost of parking/cost of vehicle is Chicago O'Hare's $105,761 spot. It was all racked up in parking tickets by one $600 Chevy. Read the full story here.
Suggested By: KevineIviS, Photo Credit: The Parking Ticket Geek
8.) GM Building, NYC $1,320/month
Reader NYC-2012 explains how some executives in his building pay about $316,000 for a parking space per year.
I work in the GM building in NYC— either the first or second most expensive commercial real estate in NYC.
Some of the bigshots in the building drive to work every day and park their cars in the garage downstairs... but instead of purchasing a monthly spot, which required checks and going through the firm, they pay daily with the company credit card.
$66/day * 20 days = $1,320 per month.
If you actually wanted to value that spot, multiply by 12 months and "cap" it at a 5% rate... $1320 * 12 / 0.05 = $316,800.
Not bad for a single spot in a parking structure with easily a few hundred spots.
Suggested By: NYC-2012, Photo Credit: Michele Ursino
7.) Hong Kong, $640,000
CEO Jacinto Tong bought this 8-feet-by-16-feet space in a Hong Kong skyscraper for $640,000. That's nearly $5K per square foot.
Suggested By: SennaMP4, Photo Credit: CNN
6.) Jay-Z's Space at the Barclays Center, $1M
Back in 2005, Jay-Z invested $1M for his stake in the Nets, which eventually put him at the forefront of the now-Brooklyn team. What perks come with his headline PR role? He can park at the Barclays Center as he pleases. That's a lot for the right to park.
Suggested By: blakmamba, Photo Credit: Jay-Z
5.) 66 E. 11th St. NYC, $1M
This NYC apartment building made headlines a few months back for the most expensive dedicated parking spot in the city, and among the most expensive in the world. At a cool million, you could pay a hundred bucks in tickets for 24 years and not match the same price.
Suggested By: Peter Carmichael, Photo Credit: 66 E. 11th St.
4.) Ritz Paris €310,250 to €5,073,500/yr
To park in the underground garage beneath the Hôtel Ritz in Paris, you need to check out a room. They start at 850 Euros a night and go up to €13,900 a night for the Imperial Suite. In terms of parking, that would run you over five million Euros a year.
Suggested By: _Mécanicien, Photo Credit: Rose Trinh
3.) Singapore Penthouse, $24M
The Penthouse at the Hamilton Parks high rise in Singapore gets you an elevator to take your supercars right up to your apartment. At $24 million for the residence, the parking is not cheap.
Suggested By: JJ, Photo Credit: Hamilton Parks
2.) USS Ronald Reagan, $4.5B
It's actually fairly common for the Navy to move the vehicles of sailors on the deck of an aircraft carrier, because it's cheaper than putting all the cars on another ship. The cost of the aircraft carrier, though, is a princely $4.5 billion.
Suggested By: ExhaustedPluto, Photo Credit: US Navy/Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Robert Winn, US Navy/Mass Communications Specialist 3rd Class Shawn J. Stewart
1.) The Moon, $3,013,492/day
The Apollo Program cost us about $25.4 billion in 1973 dollars. That's about $132B today. Spread that cost over 3 lunar rovers and the 14,601 days since we left the damn thing up there on the moon and you have a cost of over three million a day.
That's a lot of space tickets.
Suggested By: NASA, Photo Credit: NASA