The Meter is Up

It's Time for a Green Parking Policy in King County

by Gregory Hill,
Preston Schiller, and
Mike Ferro

Except for Monopoly players, there is no real free parking. The truth is that the hidden environmental costs of excess asphalt are passed along to others. This is especially unfair to those who walk, bike, use transit, or don't spend their lives cruising from one parking lot to another.
Parking is a critical factor in transportation and the quality of our urban and suburban environments. Yet commuters often have strong opinions and little solid information. Parking is important and it's time to bring it to light.
How people travel - by car, bus, bike, or on foot - depends on parking supply, location, and other factors. Retailers and elected officials seem to dream about an empty space in front of every store, with time on the meter. This is a destructive fantasy. The unavoidable truth is that more parking encourages more driving. More driving creates more air pollution and more traffic congestion. Newman and Ken-worthy in Cities and Automobile Dependency clarify the problem: San Francisco has roughly one quarter the downtown parking availability that Los Angeles has, and a San Franciscan is about four times more likely to commute by public transit than is a Los Angeleno.
Like San Francisco, Toronto recognizes that its investment in public transit will be squandered if it allows more public parking. The Toronto Sky-Dome with 70,000 seats has only 350 parking spaces. Most games are sold out, and the Blue Jays do win pennants! In contrast the vote on a new stadium in King County may have had less public support due to the perception that pro games are sources of traffic jams. The defeated Commons may also have been viewed by some voters as a trojan horse for more street construction.
Contrary to its express plans, Seattle's downtown plan, which took effect in 1985, has failed to limit off-street parking. There are now more spaces than ever downtown (see accompanying graph) and a 30 percent vacancy rate, according to the Puget Sound Regional Council.
The strip mall depends on a peculiar notion that more off-street parking located in front of a store means more business. The real reason for strip mall parking is that virtually everyone in the suburbs is auto-dependent. Sometimes on-street parking has even been disallowed by land-use regulations.
But on-street parking is desirable because it can provide an important buffer between pedestrians and moving motor vehicles - assuming there is a sidewalk. Urban retailers need to win customers at least in part by providing interesting and pleasant streetscapes suitable for pedestrians. Large parking lots are not attractive to people looking for a place to live or do business.

Full Folly Parking Policy

In the Fall of 1993, Seattle Mayor Norm Rice raised on-street parking meter rates from $1 an hour to $1.50. Merchants complained and short-sighted action by the city council rolled back the rate. The consequence was a loss of $1 million per year to the city treasury. In effect, current on-street parking is subsidized because even $1.50 an hour is well below the cheapest off-street rates. An innovative approach might have been to increase the on-street parking rate to a level higher than the off-street rate. In some European countries, higher on-street rates are intended to minimize "search" traffic, which results from driving around looking for a cheap on-street parking space.
Seattle's mayor has made a complete about-face and now promotes major expenditure by the city in new parking facilities. The largest project will be the 1500 stall, $68 million Nordstrom retail promotion package.

Putting a Price Tag On Parking

Providing more parking will always generate more demand for all sorts of facilities to support cars as more people decide to drive. To discourage this ineffective use of land, we must bring the real-world price of parking closer to drivers' attentions.
There is a need for a regional parking policy, such as a regional parking tax to equalize the imbalance between city and suburbs. Such a tax could also redress the problem in Seattle of price inversion, in which all-day parking specials are sometimes cheaper than short-term parking in some areas.
Another good tool is an employer parking cash-out strategy. this allows employers to give employees who don't drive cash bonuses and other incentives to not drive, instead of free parking. Another tool simply involves publicizing the lost opportunities that follow the commitment of large public and private budgets to parking. After all, there surely can never be such a thing as "free parking."



This article was condensed with permission from the Gridlock Gazette. For more information on parking and alternative transportation, contact AltTrans at (206) 803-0308.

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Contents on this page were published in the October/November, 1995 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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