Politics Money on Free Parking
posted by on March 14 at 10:16 AM
The Stranger staff has always been there to tell us that we need to give up our cars, that we need congestion taxes, or that we should vote “No” on more mass transit and wait for state Democrats to fail us on the issue instead. Which is why I’m surprised that I don’t recall them spending much time on another environmental issue: the excessively cheap parking on Seattle’s streets. I live in Capitol Hill and have a car I am trying to sell. I park on the street, and, like some others, find this a pain in the ass. I drive so rarely, and pay so little attention to my car, that an ecosystem is developing on it (see picture below).
Unfortunately, it’s evidently not enough of a pain in the ass to drive me to social responsibility, because I would’ve sold it months earlier if I had to buy a spot instead.
I suspect that I am not alone in this regard; every time I seek a spot, I must duke it out with many other fellow driver too cheap to buy a proper spot. My particular neighborhood is unzoned, meaning that I need to compete for spots with even more people (some looking to park for work downtown), increasing the congestion further at rush hour. The average time I find looking for a spot after I drive: about seven minutes, varying wildly depending on time of day. How much carbon is spewed out by people cruising for a spot to park their car? I haven’t done the math, but someone else took an initial stab at it:
Over the course of a year, the search for curb parking in this 15-block district created about 950,000 excess vehicle miles of travel - equivalent to 38 trips around the earth, or four trips to the moon. And here’s another inconvenient truth about underpriced curb parking: cruising those 950,000 miles wastes 47,000 gallons of gas and produces 730 tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. If all this happens in one small business district, imagine the cumulative effect of all cruising in the United States.
Yep, excessively cheap parking is a social evil. It’s a real issue: making parking too cheap creates congestion, adding 3.3 minutes cruising on average to a commute in LA. You really want to get people using public transit? Instead of focusing on quashing plans for expanded roads, get them to open up the parking lane instead. Raise the price of meters. Start charging nontrivial amounts for zoned permits.
Agreed. I work in South Lake Union area and there used to be tons of street parking. 2 hr. street parking, that is. So every two hours about a thousand of us would go out and move our cars. 4 times a day, circling and looking for parking. We'd call it the Fairview 500. Now that it's all meters I, and many others, bus to work.
I was actually hoping you were going to settle the "Money on Free Parking" Monopoly debate.
How about school buses and parents ferrying their children across town every day? Biggest damn waste of gas (and creator of noise pollution besides air pollution) there is.
how do you not get ticketed? i can't leave my car three days without tictactoe played in chalk on my tires...
Parking in Pittsburgh is very expensive for a city its size (due to geography and heavy concentration of dense offices downtown), and I don't think that fact has alleviated the traffic or cruising for spots at all. I've been trying to buy a parking spot lease lately, but they're all taken. So I have to drive around, looking for a spot in a garage somewhere, never knowing which garage will be full or empty. But it's usually only a few dollars more to get a parking ticket, so I have no trouble eating that few extra dollars (even though the price is really high) if I can get a nice spot on the street near my office.
I used to ride the bus to work, but budget deficits led them to reduce service, and I don't really want to have to wait up to an hour for an unpredicable bus arrival before I can go home after work, so my option is burning lots of fuel and contributing to congestion.
So I am exhibit A for transit reductions leading to predictable consequences.
Don't you pay insurance? Vehicle registration fees? These costs should be enough to provide a reason for you to ditch the car. Not to mention that it loses resale value by the day.
I agree, it sounds like your area needs to be zoned.
Our metering system is well engineered and well priced. I wouldn't want to change it.
The writer TSM excerpted here, Donald Shoup, came up with one of my favorite book titles, "The High Cost of Free Parking."
I wish I could say the book was as good as its title, but it's 800+ pages, and by about page 50, I realized I wasn't going to learn much more from the remaining 800 or so pages than I had already.
The larger point Shoup makes is that free parking is just as responsible as freeways for our society's current over-dependence on automobiles.
Not to worry, the Seattle PI and Times found out that we in the Sierra Club are still lukewarm about the added 1500 new parking spaces in the current ST2.1 plan for this Nov 2008, so you've got even more to worry about when we sabotage the vote this fall.
Besides, we really wanted light rail or monorail across 520, not 90 ...
Hey, if the Sonics can backstab you for a few million, why shouldn't we?
@4 Parking enforcement is very sporadic on capitol hill. My block (400 10th Ave E)has very little enforcement in spite of being just off broadway. I've seen a car sit in a 3min load zone for 24 hours without being ticketed. Other blocks are a completely different story. Consistent enforcement of the laws we already have would be a good start and raise tons of money for bike and pedestrian improvements.
Agreed 100%! This is the best unfunny freaky friday post in history.
The "transit" portion of Roads and Transit (ST2) would have created more free parking spots than any project in state history (more than 10,000!). Most of these parking spots were planned at light rail stations.
We need to stop supporting building free parking as part of "transit" programs. It predictably leads to more driving.
We need transit and light rail to dense neighborhoods and workplaces, not to giant free parking lots in the middle of nowhere.
Alternate side of the street parking, at least, in non-metered residential neighborhoods.
Seriously? A post about parking before noon? (Yawn!) What's going on over at Seattle Weekly's blog?
Okay, actually, I'm back. There's nothing going on over at Seattle Weekly's blog.
I like this post, but I'd still like a Morning News post.
Yes, the price and convenience of parking matters.
I live not far from Northgate, I'm self employed, and I have clients and business throughout the city. I rarely have to park anywhere for more than a few hours.
If I'm going downtown, I usually take the bus. There are fairly convenient options for bussing, and downtown parking is a hassle and expensive. So the bus wins out.
If I'm going to Capitol Hill or another neighborhood, I usually drive. There are no convenient busses. I'd have to switch busses, which can add ages to the trip, and it isn't all that hard to find a parking spot. So the car wins out.
If there were better options for transit, and parking was more expensive, I would definitely shift some of my current trips from car to bus.
As soon as they make it EASIER to get around town via public transportation I will get rid of my car. I live on QA, I work off of Eastlake 4 miles away. It takes 45 minutes to get there on the bus because I have to bus downtown, transfer, then bus to Eastlake. Why would I do this when I can drive to my work in 5 minutes? They already have taken away tons of parking in my area. It went from 2 hour parking to metered. There is 1 block of zoned parking for about 15 apartments/condo buildings, and half the time there are no parking signs set up everywhere because of all the condo construction taking up the zoned residential spots (God forbid they park in the metered spots and the city loses some money). I'm not going to feel bad for driving my car 7 miles a day in this public transportation retarded city. And the only time it's hard to find parking is when the assholes going to the Key decide to park in the parking spots that are zoned for residents rather than pay $10 bucks in the lot 20 feet away.
What if we raised parking permit rates based on how well each zone is served by public transit? That would encourage people who can take transit to do so, while not hurting people who live in car-bound areas (Naturally, this is coming from someone who lives on the 'hill and doesn't drive anymore).
@16 Depending on where you are on the hill, it sounds like you have an ideal bike commute.
@4 - They're pretty lax about the 72-hour rule, although I do sometimes just go out and move my car from one spot to another every few days if I don't drive it somewhere.
As for the Monopoly issue: money on free parking is deeply, deeply wrong.
Yea, I should totally risk my life and nearly get/get run over every day. I see how all you sloggers complain nearly daily about how treacherous it is out there on a bike. Or maybe get stuck in the trolly tracks? The rain is just an added bonus. I work in a professional office, we don't have showers, and there's no where to store a bike in my apartment building. It's not an excuse, it's just the way it is.
have free parking at the office
lots of space on the street in my Beacon Hill neighborhood
so zzzzzzzzz not my issue
@20 sounds like you love driving, plain and simple.
TSM: Huh? We sure as hell have covered the parking issue. For example:
http://slog.thestranger.com/2006/04/this_is_a_blog_1
Here:
http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/05/why_i_really_hate_cars
And here:
http://slog.thestranger.com/2007/08/downtowns_new_grocery_store,
...to name just a few. And you're damn lucky you're able to let your car sit and grow moss; according to city law, you HAVE to move it every 72 hours or they can tow it away. Now THAT's a policy that encourages cruising.
I have always been able to park for free on Capitol Hill, and I expect I always will. You just have to know where and when, and I do.
Anything to flip a big stinking bird to the jamiers of the world.
What a stupid fucking suggestion.
Here's a modest proposal: the next person to propose making car-commuting more difficult without making mass-transit correspondingly easier gets kicked in the groin.
If anything, capitol hill needs more zoned parking for residents, and Mayor Baby Huey needs to pull his head out of the developers' asses long enough to realize that eliminating/reducing parking requirements for new construction makes the hill unlivable.
@23 - well, those first two posts (which I did see) really didn't come off as advocating less parking on environmental grounds. But ... fair enough, it has been mentioned.
@22, I DO love driving, especially when it's 40 minutes faster than taking the bus to work. I take the bus if I'm going DT, that is convenient.
@25, THANK YOU
@24 - I agree with Ivan. I can't think of the last time I paid to park, except for maybe downtown during the day.
This week, I once again was challenged as to why I was contentious towards living in the suburbs, and again, I told people that I didn't move to Seattle to live in Kent and drive in or take 2-3 buses to see Seattle every now and then.
Owning a car is expensive and, as you have found out, a giant pain in the ass, many times an even bigger pain in the ass than commuting by bus and foot to the same destination would have been.
That said, there's a reason housing in the suburbs is cheaper. You get what you pay for. Accept the fate you've chosen for yourself.
And if living in Seattle ever became cost prohibitive for me, I admit I would move away to another city rather than take an apartment in Renton, West Seattle or Shoreline.
24. People never think to park down towards 14th, 15th and 16th and walk a few blocks down, rather than insistently trying to find scarce parking near Broadway.
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