What you're actually noticing
If you own a brownstone or a rowhouse in Park Slope, Ditmas Park, or Bay Ridge, you probably don't drive much. The subway gets you to work, the car sits at the curb for days, and when you do take it out it's for Costco runs to Red Hook or a weekend trip upstate. That pattern makes a low mileage lease look like the obvious money saver. It usually is, but only if you're honest with yourself about how the car actually gets used, not how you imagine it will be used.
The mistake homeowners make here isn't about the car. It's about underestimating how much driving a Brooklyn life still requires even when the train handles the commute. Airport runs, moving furniture, ferrying kids to activities outside the transit grid, weekend trips to see family in Jersey or Long Island. Those add up fast, and a lease with 7,500 or 10,000 miles a year has no room for surprises.
Where the miles actually go in this borough
Brooklyn driving is short and frequent rather than long and rare, which is a different mileage problem than people expect. A trip to a hardware store on Third Avenue, a drive to drop off dry cleaning, a run to a kid's soccer practice in Marine Park: none of these feel like much, but they stack. If your building doesn't have off street parking, and most prewar brownstones don't, you're also driving around the block hunting for a spot after alternate side parking rules kick in, and that circling counts as miles too.
Winter changes the math as well. When snow routes and street cleaning suspensions shift parking around, or when a nor'easter makes the subway unreliable for a day or two, people who normally take the train end up driving more than usual for a stretch. It's not a huge chunk of annual mileage, but it's the kind of unplanned use that a tight lease doesn't forgive.
More on this from Choosing A Low Mileage Lease When You Mostly Take The Train.
What you can check yourself before signing
Pull your last twelve months of driving if you can. Most people have a rough sense of weekly train use but no real sense of car use, because the car trips feel incidental. Look at EZ-Pass statements, gas fill ups, or just count the weekends you drove somewhere. If you're at 5,000 miles a year, a 7,500 mile lease has breathing room. If you're closer to 8,000, that same lease will run you into overage charges by month ten.
Also think honestly about where the car lives. Street parking in most Brooklyn neighborhoods means the car is exposed to salt in winter and to the general wear of a dense city: door dings, minor scrapes, the occasional fender bender from someone squeezing into a tight spot. None of that shows up as mileage, but it does show up at lease end inspection, and low mileage leases tend to have stricter wear and tear standards because the whole deal assumes a lightly used car.
The parking and storage angle nobody mentions
If you have a garage, even a small one under a newer rowhouse or in one of the co-op buildings near Bay Ridge or Bensonhurst, that changes the calculation in your favor. A car that spends winters under cover doesn't accumulate the same rust and salt damage a street-parked car does, and it's easier to keep low mileage honest because you're not making extra trips just to move the car for street cleaning.
Without a garage, you're part of the daily shuffle: moving the car twice a week to avoid tickets, sometimes driving several blocks to find legal parking after 8pm. That's real mileage that has nothing to do with actually going anywhere. Factor it in before you commit to the lowest mileage tier just because it looks cheapest on paper.
When it stops being a homeowner decision
Estimating your own driving pattern is something you can and should do yourself with a calendar and a little honesty. But once you're comparing mileage tiers against buyout costs, disposition fees, and how a dealer will actually assess wear at turn-in, that's a negotiation, not a homeowner task. A leasing consultant or finance person can run the numbers on whether 7,500, 10,000, or 12,000 miles a year makes sense given your specific commute pattern and parking situation.
The one thing worth doing before that conversation is tracking three or four weeks of actual driving, not estimated driving. Brooklyn's transit access makes people assume they barely use a car, and sometimes that's true. But the borough's parking rules, weather disruptions, and short-trip habits mean actual mileage is often higher than the mental picture. Bring real numbers to that conversation instead of a guess, and you'll end up with a lease that fits how you live instead of how you'd like to live.