"The average wine list downtown is longer than four pages," Scholes says while wondering aloud why his organization is seen out of touch with regular Seattle voters.

Meanwhile, the DSA has a parking study up that basically dismisses their claims: http://www.downtownseattle.com/content/b…

Average hourly parking rates for all tracts is above $4 in all but two of them and the tract with the second highest occupancy has an hourly rate of $9.75. The highest occupancy rate has an average hourly rate of $6.51.

Their own studies show the market value of parking in this city can absorb much higher rates than it currently does.

@1 best comment of the week award.

Drilling down further through the data, it looks like the average hourly rate for the most active tract has increased by about $3 from around $6.75 to about $9.75 today: http://www.psrc.org/data/transportation/…

Most other tracts have absorbed year-to-year increases equal to or greater than the current proposed increase for on-street parking, meaning they increase parking rates at commercial lots at a rate that is exponential to the proposed increase achieved via an increase to the CPT.

Basically, anything the Council says about increasing CPT or parking rates is unsubstantiated anti-revenue pap that has dire consequences for pedestrian, road, bike and transit improvements and continues a trend of parking-related gridlock in the central core that could be mitigated through proven market-driven incentives and disincentives, all the while putting vital projects in jeopardy.

Here's the dirty little secret about City Council's pet project, the Deeply Boring Tunnel (aka Billionaires' Tunnel):

It will literally have TWICE the carbon emissions and TWICE the particulate emissions of the existing viaduct and the two other alternatives.

It will literally put King County into VIOLATION of the EPA regulations for carbon emissions.

It will literally put King County into VIOLATION of the EPA regulations for particulate emissions.

Nothing green about it.

Other than the money being shoveled to foreign firms and developers for a "project" the VOTERS and CITIZENS of this city never APPROVED.

Can you smell it yet? Cause when those extra 50,000 cars and trucks are diverted to city arterials since they won't fit in the tunnel, you will.

All this for vanity.

And when this fails. Tax the cyclist. Force them to wear a helmet, then place a tax on safety helmets. Its only fair.

Will, please stop spamming with these canned responses to the Deep Bore Tunnel, which has little or nothing to do with the parking fee hike. If anything, a tunnel will help filter out pollution with a series of air filters that we currently have in place on the current bus tunnel.

@1,

How convenient (for you) that the study only covers downtown and Belltown. How will increased rates and elimination of free evening and Sunday parking affect the rest of the city?

@6: That's a red herring in this specific case, we're looking at Downtown and their current parking situation which has rates that far exceed the planned $4 street-parking rate. You'll note the reference to downtown in the original post and my own reference to Scholes.

But we do have studies, for example this study of the whole city circa 1999 show that Capitol Hill's low on-street parking rate limited the availability to residents with people hide-and-riding or exceeding allowed parking time and that most other cities had issues from unregulated on-street parking: http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/pd…

In this study in 2002, the city was told very clearly that their rates were too low citywide and made parking less available to local residents and businesses. The recommendation at Table 12, Item A-3 says rates contemporary to 2002 and not far off from today's rates must be increased: http://www.cityofseattle.net/transportat…

The study from 2002 also advises the city to increase fines and strongly increase enforcement.

@5 it's not a canned response. Each one is different.

The fact that you can't tell that shows you know I'm right.

@8, you're saying "the fact that no one understands anything I write or cares enough to read it proves how important it is". Uh-huh.

@5

No dude, you take the same paragraph and re-shape it into whatever topic were talking about. It could be Transgendered Smurf Parody Porn and somehow the billionares tunnel is violently wedged into the conversation.