Remember way back when Seattle had open parking spaces? Think back a few years. Further. Yah, when parking was a few quarters, you could park in front of or in the same block as the store you needed? Fast forward to today: Parking in some neighborhoods are up to $7 per hour on streets and garages are $12-25 per hour, depending on what time you pull in. When my bf had his car, we had to park two miles from the apartment and walk back, then the next day, two miles straight up Seattle’s Hills to get the car again. We were so lucky it was never broken into. We no longer have a car living in the city, we use the monthly car sharing system and it works pretty well.
What happened to Seattle’s parking, you ask? It’s all news talks about now, so here it is in a nutshell. Existing parking spaces are disappearing to make room for bike lanes. They are needed, as Seattle’s Drivers and Bicyclists can’t seem to get along sharing the lanes. This cuts down on vehicles plowing down bikes, killing cyclists and running them off the road. Some parking spaces are getting renovated into miniature parks to beautify the city. Nice, but useless. Or the city puts up no parking sawhorses to prevent parking. Newer buildings, condos and skyscrapers aren’t putting in parking spaces so as to force people to use Seattle’s Public Transportation, which, apparently, is always on the verge of bankruptcy.
Seattle’s Transportation System is always threatening to cut bus lines, services, because they don’t have enough money coming in.
What are they doing with it? No one seems to know.
So now those living in Seattle’s suburbs are threatening to stop coming into Seattle-who can blame them? To cross one of the bridges into Seattle it could cost up to $25 per day! On top of $50-100 parking garage. Who has that kind of money?
Seattle needs to do something constructive about the car-parking-transit situation. Either cut costs of parking garages and spaces, ban cars altogether and create permits for construction/delivery/service vehicles like some cities in Europe, or double the transportation/transit system.
Brick ONeil 