Last Wednesday, SDOT held a public hearing at the Hamilton International School to solicit comment on proposed changes to the Restricted Parking Zones (RPZs) in our neighborhood. A review of the RPZs by SDOT had been solicited by neighbors impacted by an influx of drivers seeking all-day parking during weekday business hours. The meeting, attended by about 75 people, began with a brief outline of the proposal by SDOT followed by 2-minute comments from residents and then time for questions.
This RPZ proposal has been under development for some time, informed by an SDOT study of parking patterns in the affected areas. We wrote about this process back in November and February. The current proposal is the end result of that process.
RPZs seek to limit parking in the neighborhoods by commuters that then walk or even bike to their places of employment. Permits are available to residents to allow them to park long-term during the day and to allow their guests to park (albeit on a shorter-term basis). Vehicles without permits are generally allowed to park short-term (two hours) to, say, visit local businesses.
Full details of the SDOT proposal can be found here on the SDOT website. Highlights include:
- Elimination of Zone 5 near the Guild 45th due to the closure of the Guild and the relatively small number of permits requested by area residents
- Creation of a new RPZ (Zone 34) west of I-5 between 42nd and 50th
- Creation of a new RPZ (Zone 33) east of Stone Way and south of 47th that will steal some blocks from the former Zone 22. Effective hours of this zone will be 7AM-6PM, M-F
- A reduction in size of Zone 22 keeping the current effective hours
The comment portion of the hearing went for the scheduled hour. While the RPZ changes were generally well received, a large number of commenters sought some changes to the boundaries of some of the proposed new zones. A number of people were critical of SDOT’s proposal to eliminate zone 5. Here is a sampling of what I heard:
- On zone 33 borders:
- Should be extended to 49th St. near Wallingford Ave.;
- Should be extended to 48th St. near Stone Way because of the elimination of parking on the east side of Stone and the housing going in at the Bill the Butcher site;
- A resident of an apartment on 45th is seeing a shrinking number of available street spaces, but is outside the RPZ;
- The zone should generally be made larger;
- “I’m perplexed by the boundaries. What happens on the west side of Stone Way?”
- Can this RPZ be delayed until the transportation needs for Lincoln High School are determined?
- On zone 34 borders:
- Zone should be extended much farther south due to all the UW employees that park there to go to work;
- Effect of new U District light rail station should be factored in
- On RPZ permit fees:
- Can there be a sliding scale for these?
- Why should anyone be charged for a permit at all?
- On the effect of bike lanes on 40th on the RPZs:
- Cars that used to park on 40th will be pushed to the side streets;
- Can a count be made of the number of parking spaces lost on 40th?
- On the elimination of Zone 5:
- With the creation of new RPZs, cars will be pushed toward the unrestricted parking where this zone used to be;
- It is imprudent to remove this zone when we don’t know what is to become of the Guild 45th space;
- new housing will only increase congestion in this zone
- Other comments:
- Can RPZ permits be made available for businesses?
- If we prevent people from parking in Wallingford, where will they park?
- Can some sort of restrictions be placed around Wallingford Playfield to allow people to easily park to use those facilities?
- Can the RPZ process (even adding a few blocks to an existing zone) be sped up to keep pace with development?
If you were unable to make it to the hearing to offer your opinion, the comment period is still open until April 15. Comments can be provided by
- Web form at survey monkey
- Email: [email protected]
- Phone: (206) 684-4103
SDOT plans to come up with a final plan and implementation schedule sometime in late May 2018. Neighbors will be notified in June.
RPZ is a system of rationing a limited resource. Any system of rationing creates winners and losers. This is also true of no system at all, i.e. the status quo. Debating who the winners and losers are creates animosity. People in houses vs people in apartments. Residents vs UW commuters. Newcomers vs old-timers. You can tell things are bad when people in Wallingford are negative about John Stanford teachers. We also lose when any suggestion that on street spaces could be used for anything else are dismissed madness by many.
The solution is not rationing. The solution is to reduce the demand. Provide high quality transit. Make safe streets for people walking and biking. Convenient options to use a car without having to own one. Making it easy for local business to serve people in their own neighborhoods. This is not about forcing people out of cars. Nobody is coming to take your car. This is about giving people options. Many people will choose not to have a car in Wallingford and others will chose not drive to Wallingford as part of their commute.
Many people will never walk or bike and many people will never give up their car. That’s okay, this is about having enough people chose different options. Then parking and the many other down sides of car dependence are reduced.
RPZ is just giving out reserved seats in a game of musical chairs.
“This is not about forcing people out of cars.”
“while recognizing “the outcry from many in the community,…The work on climate that we’re doing and the protection of off-street parking are mutually exclusive…“We have to figure out how as a community we make that transition to a carbon-free — and sometimes that means car-free — future, and it’s going to involve significantly hard decisions like this,” CM Mike O’Brien
Oh, no, we’re not trying to force you out of your cars, we’re just making some “significantly hard decisions” for you by deliberately making it harder to park and get around town by car.
Furthermore, they’re not “giving people options.” Instead of providing realistic and effective options like more and better bus service, they simply changed their own rule on “frequent transit service” to suit their HALA upzone agenda. Scheduled bus headways is different from actual headways All they did was change the definition of FTS from being on time every 15 minutes 85% of the time to just 3 times per hour.
No kidding. have you ever planned on taking a bus and it is 115 minutes late? No one buys the “late bus” excuse.
It was nice to see a lot of new faces at the hearing and the overwhelming support for not just the new RPZ’s but the expansion of them. Some were seniors worried about having to walk farther to their cars, while others were families with young children and some younger renters as well. Likewise, people were strongly opposed to the removal of parking for more exclusive bike lanes, as well as more development with no on-site parking requirements without mitigating it’s impact on the neighborhood. And nearly all the commenters pointed out how people who don’t live in the neighborhood park their cars here to use to take transit to UW or downtown, essentially making the hood into a Park N Ride.
Let’s keep the pressure on SDOT and the city council to consider the needs of those other than the 3% of bike commuters!
Well, it’s good that people are getting involved, but it’s kind of sad, that the situation has gotten bad enough that people are eager to deal with all the hassles of the RPZ system. Paying for a permit is the least of it. What if you have more than one visiting guest? What about small local businesses? Do you want intermittent parking patrols on your street looking for things to ticket you for (and believe me, they don’t limit themselves to RPZ violations, nor do they police those very effectively in my experience.)
Agreed. However, with more and more bike lanes taking away parking, and the council’s move the other day to increase the area allowing developers to build large projects with ZERO on-site parking, it’s the impending reality of the situation. The way it’s trending here, parking woes will be like those in Capitol Hill, with everyone driving around for 10 or 20 minutes to find a spot blocks away from their home. $65 every two years for the RPZ sticker will be well worth it.
If you care about small local businesses and visiting guests, we should meter street parking and implement time limits. Free parking with no time limit is the root cause of not having parking spots for visitors and small business customers. I will support the idea of meter everywhere instead of RPZ. The technology is good enough that we can do micro-payment and utilization-adjusted rates on all cars parked.
“Free parking with no time limit is the root cause of not having parking spots…”
I’m going to take a leap of faith here and suggest that eliminating parking spots is a root cause of not having parking spots.
Eliminating free parking spots would solve the problem of not having parking spots. If you raise the price enough, spaces will free up. Seattle is in general doing a great job of that in many key areas with shopping, observing how many spots would free up at what time of the day to adjust the pricing and time limit. For example, they lowered the price and raise the limit in some blocks around the Roosevelt Whole Foods when they realize resulted in too many unused spaces, and kept increasing the price and limit in International District to ensure there can be a reasonable amount of spaces available for visitors and shoppers. If you want the space in front of your house free most of the time, the easiest way would be putting a high parking price on it.
Thank you.
Sorry, for me to go downtown on bus it takes 5-10 miinutes to walk to bus stop. 10-15 more to wait if I miss one or if it is off schedule. Then 20-25 to go downtown. I pretty much do nto go downtown now due to this and high parking costs. Going to UW shopping.. 5-10-20 to walk and wait… then 15-20 to get there. Same going back. If I drive and park in UW Bookstore for 30 minute it is free.. or I pay a little.. It takes 10-15 to drive each way unless it is traffic rush time. I will not ride my bike most places because I would be on Stone Way N where drivers oft go up to 40 mph or on 45th wiht such randon buses popping in an dout of traffic as well as random jaywalkers and the noise.
The interesting thing is that transit has both gotten more convenient for accessing downtown, and plenty of other destinations besides. Rather than two infrequent, unreliable routes going downtown (16 and 26), we now have a frequent option (62), a still-infrequent one (26), and a totally new option that opens up possibilities beyond downtown (frequent 31/32 or 44 -> very frequent Link). The last is nice because it gives a way to avoid highway or downtown traffic; if I know some event is happening, I will prefer the reliability of Link even though it means a transfer.
There’s still plenty of reliability issues with transit, but it is so much better than it was even three years ago, let alone 11 years ago when I moved here.
Umm yeah better but not accountable!!! I want to go to Seattle Center for the vegfest. Metro has me take E line and get off and walk 5 blocks??? It used to drop people off at the NE corner of Seattle center. I could an dprobably will drive, ( 8 minutes, take a drive around a block to steal residents’ parking who went on an errand or drive 5 blocks away an dwalk the 5 I would have had to walk grace of Metro but in a safer area. Geesh- which do you think I will do?
If you don’t want to get off at Denny, you can transfer at 3rd onto the 1/2/4/13/D which combine for 20 buses/hour (one every three minutes) even on Sundays.
Lucky you are not one of those people who’ve lived in Seattle forever but now moved to Kent or further then. If you can’t walk five blocks(!?!), take a Lyft from home or do bike share from the bus stop.
What is this “residents’s parking” you are talking about? Parking in somebody’s drive way? Street parking is not resident parking. The real stealth is people parking in streets free. That’s stealing from the public. The US already taxed car usage way lower than most other countries, and free parking is making it worse.
It’s kind of weird to talk about how transit here is not convenient, AND talk about how people are using here as park and ride for transit to UW or downtown. The real truth is transit here is so convenient that people are parking here. I walk to UW or take the transit bus to downtown all the time and found it very convenient, same as those who parked here.
“It’s so hard to find parking and catch a bus here that people go out of their way to drive here from elsewhere to park and catch the bus”
Eliminating Zone 5 while Guild will never re-open, nor Iron Bull, likely will open a bunch of places for people who drive to neighborhood from north an dpark to bus to Univ of wA. Hooray!
I think those blocks should be metered, so people who dine in the restaurants can have places to park. Sunnyside between 45th and 44th for example could make the city some money if they meter the people who go to the poke place for example. And that could stop visitors from driving deeper into the neighborhoods looking for parking.
Everybody’s favorite the HALA committee recommended “parking benefit districts” in which “a share of the funds from parking meters and other public parking charges pay for neighborhood improvements, chosen with neighborhood input.”
Even beyond physical improvements, in a neighborhood like Wallingford metering everything and then using the funds to defer elderly or low income homeowners’ property taxes or subsidize rent in the ‘hood for low income families seems like a constructive idea…
http://www.sightline.org/2016/09/01/how-seattle-is-suppressing-a-key-parking-fix/
“It’s so hard to find parking and catch a bus here that people go out of their way to drive here from elsewhere to park and catch the bus”
Perhaps this is due to the transit not being as bad in Wallingford as it is farther out and a shortage of sufficient free park n’rides. One item that Seattle appears to have the heebie-jeebies about are large parking structures at select locations near frequent transit to allow folks to drive part way and leave their car at the perimeter.
Despite wishful thinking, there has been much data to indicate that installing meters rather than two-hour parking in the business district has pretty nasty impacts. Wallingford business district has always been pretty borderline and I fear that imposing payment will simply kill off the few struggling businesses that remain.
Wallingford is a RESIDENTIAL urban village (which City Staff frequently forgets or ignores) which is defined as where folks live, but the business district is not considered vibrant and reliable enough to provide the jobs necessary for those that live there. Yet another reason why “one-size fits all” by MHA will create significant mismatches to what actual exists in a neighborhood.
Most places are residential and don’t have enough jobs for all residents. The mismatch is going to be smaller if we build up Wallingford as opposed to Shoreline or Kent, since it’s way closer to most jobs than those places. And parking fee isn’t going to kill businesses. It’ll change businesses. High parking fee places in the city are all full of businesses.
Thanks very much for attending, and for the excellent summary, Jack — I was out of town and missed the meeting. Your notes are much appreciated!