December 11, 2007 -- Get ready for some curb rage.

The city is looking into a plan to raise the price of street parking to as high as $15 an hour in an effort to tame traffic, officials said yesterday.

The Department of Transportation is considering so-called performance-based parking, in which curbside rates in busy neighborhoods are raised as high as the market will bear.

City officials, who have been holding community meetings across the city on proposals to ease traffic, will meet with a consultant tomorrow to discuss it further.

The DOT invited "parking guru" Donald Shoup, a professor of Urban Planning at UCLA and author of "The High Cost of Free Parking" who favors the city adopting the plan.

"Why not let the people who want to park pay the price?" he asked.

Shoup engineered a similar plan in Los Angeles, where he said the top parking rate rose to $3 an hour.

Metered parking in Midtown now costs $2 an hour for cars and up to $9 for trucks.

A study in SoHo by Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group for cyclists and pedestrians, estimated that 20 percent of the drivers clogging the streets were just searching for parking.



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