Reduced Parking Not Popular — Duh
The Seattle P-I takes a look at some street-level, real world reactions to the city's plan to reduce the amount of parking downtown.
To owner Steve Shulman — who relies on seven angled spots in front of his small market — a city proposal to reduce or eliminate minimum parking requirements in neighborhood business hubs around the city seems insane.Bingo. Of course, where "better transit alternatives" would go is the multi-billion dollar question, isn't it. Still though, if they want to ban cars from downtown, why don't they just do it. You know that's what they're trying to work toward.
"It blows me away that they want to cut more parking because it's so precious right now," he said. "It's a huge disconnect — just talk to the people, ask what their shopping habits are, where do they go and why."
The changes would make commercial areas more pedestrian friendly. But some say the city's tough-love approach to parking is likely to create huge frustrations without better transit alternatives.
(Jennifer Langston, Seattle P-I, 04.29.2006)
2 comments:
I found it profoundly odd that the subhead of this article was "Transit push may threaten businesses," yet the experts and studies quoted within demonstrated that, in fact, it wouldn't. If the P-I's just going to be a mouthpiece, maybe it's good that it's going away.
I know with the failure of the monorail, no one's willing to speak of a "rail" solution to our congestion. But my thought has always been that the monorail failed because it was simply too unambitious.
I am very excited to see what light rail does for commuters along I-5 corridor. But for the rest of the city, does anyone besides me think we should come up with a london-esque rail (or at least non-road) solution that is grandiose, expensive, sexy (sexier than buses at least!), and a gift for the generations of Seattlites to come? If you calculate all the businesses it could attract, the density it could foster, the quality of life, the reduction of wasted gas and wasted hours... maybe, just maybe, the huge bill would pay for itself?
I've spent hours dreaming up a big four-leafed clover mass transit system... roughly circling northwest/ northeast seattle on one leaf, stretching across 520 and circling kirkland on the other; the lower half circling bellevue south of 520 to I90 on one loop, and S. Seattle, W. Seattle on the other. The hub, of course, would be downtown Seattle.
We'd need Napoleon to pull it off-- something other than democracy. And we'd have to kiss our small-town city living goodbye. But does anyone else out there like the idea?
Maybe then we could justify the cost of our houses.
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