There are parking meters downtown and in some particularly busy commercial districts, but on most Seattle streets, you can park your car at the curb, for free.
That’s dumb.
Parking is a valuable commodity. The real estate isn’t free, the pavement isn’t free, the pollution and traffic certainly isn’t free. Making parking free simply encourages more driving.
Driving ought to be discouraged, and an easy, obvious way to discourage driving would be to make drivers pay to park their cars. Let’s start with fees of, say, $50 per month per vehicle, which is a great deal for parking — less than two bucks a day.
If your car doesn’t have a parking permit on the windshield, it gets ticketed or towed.
By my half-ass guestimate, there are more than a million cars here in Martin Luther King County. $50 p/month would raise about $600-million annually — that’s money that could house the homeless, and decrease some of the misery we all see in this city, in every city.
Or maybe give all the money to transit, so people don’t need or want to drive their damned cars.
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