I've always thought of the Seattle Times as a newspaper written from the perspective of someone who lives in Bellevue.

The Seattle Times often sucks, but they make a great point in their piece. People drive. Get over it. People like driving. Get over it. You cannot make cars illegal. Get over it.

Thanks, bye.

In more remote and chronically underserved by transit, ok, so people don't drag their cars all the way into downtown. One you get into civilization the city transit should feed into LR, minimal parking, just enough to not make the TOD unlivable with walkable neighborhoods littered with commuter cars.

No one is saying that "people don't drive" or "people don't like driving", @3. Car guys can't help but strawman anything anyone who isn't 100% on their side in every case, and you and the ST Ed Board are no exception.

What we are saying - and get this right - is that with incredibly limited transit funds, we shouldn't be spending money that helps the very few instead of making obvious improvements for the very many. Parking has terrible ROI, and cities should grow around transit, not places for sleeping cars.

Maybe I'm grading on a curve here, but I consider this editorial progress for the Times editorial board. At least they're arguing for parking around stations rather than being categorically opposed to light rail, even if, as Heidi says, the Times editorial board could just be holding their cards close to their vest on their inevitable opposition to ST3, even if Sound Transit comes up with a plan that's the equivalent of the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination, i.e. "If you opposite this plan, there's no plan we can come up with that you'll support."

As a mass transit supporter, I'm not categorically opposed to parking around stations. I look at open-air parking lots around stations as a waste of valuable acreage. I look at structured parking around stations as a big-ticket item that isn't necessarily the most efficient use of funds. And I realize that some of that structured parking may be a political necessity because not all the public officials and not all the voters share my cost-benefit analysis.

So I'll just add this one critical qualifier. To the extent Sound Transit does inccorporate structured parking into ST3, they should be making it paid parking, to get the most efficient use out of those spaces and to recoup that infrastructure investment. Think The High Cost of Free Parking.

Let's take this line from the Times editorial: Sound Transit is starting to experiment with ways to better manage parking, such as using ORCA transit cards to verify spots are used by commuters. It's a short step from doing that to using the ORCA cards to pay for the spaces.

I'm glad to see our local Sierra Club chapter is thinking along roughly the same lines.

@5, thank god the pro-transit folks are much more inclusive in their positions.

Unfortunately I think some parking structures near suburban light rail stops are a necessary evil, as they're located in sprawly areas with haphazard or non-existent bus networks, and no suburbanites are going to vote for light rail that they can't get to. But it's hard to tell what exactly the ed board is advocating for here - investing in a downtown Bellevue parking garage is insanity.

It'll be ironic when ST3 includes a bunch of expensive parking concessions to the Times crowd, which will turn around and oppose the measure because of the elevated price tag.

Adding parking to the light rail stations that are far from the city core (aka Othello) makes sense. There isn't good transit to get people in Rainier Beach, Hillman City or Columbia City to the light rail stations if they don't already live close by. Transit-minded folks in that area will put up with the 7 (or catch the 9 if they're lucky) to connect to the Beacon Hill station, but many will just not bother and drive. yes, we should be reducing car use in the city, but denying that some of the people who come into the city live in areas where a car is more of a necessity (and where local transit services are unlikely to drastically improve) isn't going to accomplish that.

@3:

People who like cars THAT much probably aren't going to opt for public transit in the first place, so why cater to them, when instead we could use all that valuable real-estate around LR stations to, you know, provide space for people to live so they don't HAVE to drive to the station.

There should be parking at the far end of the lines. There is lots of parking at Northgate and the airport, so I'd say it's pretty well taken care of. Putting parking around the stops in the middle of the line would be daft.

The cost for the Tukwila parking expansion is less than 1% of the overall ST3 estimate - no big deal. If this keeps 1000 extra cars out of Seattle then I'm all for it!

@9 - That is pretty much my story. I leave near the Columbia City and Mt. Baker stations, but getting there means driving, since the main bus line is the #7, which only runs north/south on Rainier and there aren't any east/west connections to rail from the surrounding neighborhoods. It takes longer for me to walk to and wait for a #7 than it does to walk directly to a station. It's much faster to drive to a station and park at the rail station. Maybe it's selfish, but I can drive to a station in 5 minutes, but walking or taking the bus takes 30. Multiply that x2 for a round trip and there's no contest. I don't have an extra hour each time I want to ride rail.

@11 there is parking at the UW which is currently the far end of the line.

What seems to be missing here is EV charging at every parking lot along the way. The UW lot has 2 charging stations but there are zero anywhere south of I-90 and east of I-5. The parking lots near ST stations would be great spots for these and will be necessary if we're going to decarbonize all transportation in the city.

If you look at this on a microscale, I see the point of those who oppose the idea of more parking around rail stations. But the problem is that Seattle on a macroscale is a car loving city and there is no broad incentive to give up driving your car in many Seattle neighborhoods, because the alternative ways to work are a dragged out olympics of time suck. Large cities are not immune to cars either - NYC and Chicago? These are also packed to the gills with cars but both cities have set ups that owning a car is a fucking hassle: neighborhood permits, constant street cleaning, outrageous fees to basically leave your car sitting in 3rd party lot for days or weeks at a time, etc. In Seattle, we basically encourage people to drive out of one side of our mouths and resent them out of the other. This is a bigger conversation that a lot of people aren't willing to have, so until then...

Or, you can live within 4 blocks of something like a rapid ride stop and observe all the cars people drive into the neighborhood to stash on the streets and ride mass transit into the city, transforming an area where big new buildings are "no parking needed due to transit frequency" into one where parking is even more scarce.

The qualifications for RPZs seem to be increasingly strict. Maybe proximity to these stations should make RPZs easier to obtain.

Quick math:
It costs $60M for parking for 1,000 cars. To pay that off in 30 years, just charge $165/month to park there. Parking downtown is $250ish, so this isn't unreasonable. Charging anything less than $165/month should be considered a subsidy, and for what?

Can someone contrast the request for parking serving those who should come to use light rail to the request for seats to be removed from these trains to have more cargo bike storage space ? Why should we remove butt capacity for cargo bikes but not provide parking ?

@15 Good points.

Downtown, you can park all day for $14. Unlike Chicago, New York, SF, in Seattle the cost difference between driving and using transit is pretty low.

@17, here's an 11 year old's school report about SafeCo and he explains that the 2,000 parking spot garage off occidental cost $33.5 million. Seems like $60 mil for 1,000 spaces might be a little off.

http://www.selah.k12.wa.us/soar/projects…
"For the 2,000 parking spaces in the parking garage the cost was $33.5 million."

When I go downtown I would vastly prefer to take light rail. However, keep travel time under 1 hour each way I have to drive to the light rail station. Purists may insist that I am still driving and that is unsustainable, but being able to park and ride means I drive 3.5 miles to the light-rail station and park in Tukwila as opposed to driving 17.5 miles and parking in downtown Seattle.
If I can't park near a light rail station I will drive downtown - at least I will be struggling to find parking close to my destination.

I walk, drive, bike and use mass transit. It makes sense to make it easier for people to integrate modes. Whatever it takes to get people to use mass transit and get out of their cars has to be positive doesn't it?

Thought I posted a comment, but I'm not sure where it went...

Anyway, I think anything that gets people out of their cars is a good thing, even if it's only for part of their journey. BTW, there's nothing that says that a parking facility adjacent to a light rail station can't charge appropriately for parking.

I think taking the obvious historical --and well-proven-- examples of, you know, other cities with mature light-rail transit systems would be the clear-eyed thing to do, as @2 points out. There ain't no special parking near EL stations, nor near Métro stations in Paris, nor.. etc. etc.

Apparently, light-rail stations don't need extra parking near them. Because, you know, they do their job properly and get people out of cars, and moved around the city efficiently.

@13 - "I can drive to a station in 5 minutes"
How much extra time does it take for you to find parking?

There are many, many @21s out there, which should be blindingly obvious to everybody. Also, let's not forget that part of the ROI is environmental. As @21 points out, building lots is actually a GOOD thing from a pollution perspective. Does that not at least partially offset the cost? Or has the Stranger morphed into a hardcore dollars-and-cents scold, global warming be damned?

For people wanting to commute into and out of Seattle, I don't have a problem supplying parking.... This means:
Northgate Park-n-Ride
Tukwilla Park-and-Ride
Maybe Angle Lake (not sure what that is).

For those of us living *in* Seattle, get your ass on a bus.

@18- I strongly suspect the cargo bike lobby is quite a bit smaller than the car lobby.

Why aren't there parking structures built, or planned for, the terminus stations of the system? This is, in fact, how other rail systems have been built, contrary to claims otherwise. (Look at Boston, Portland, and DC; even BART has some large parking structures)

@17 a subsidy for getting those 1000 cars off downtown streets, perhaps? Isn't that the point?
@21, exactly. My commute is already long because I can't afford to live in the pricey areas downtown or close to transit. If I can save 20-30 minutes each way on my commute by driving to a park & ride instead of waiting for an infrequent bus, the goal of getting me out of my car and reducing downtown congestion is still met, and I get to have an extra hour a day with my loved ones. It's the people who argue against parking who are so short-sighted they can't see beyond their privileged city lifestyles.

I live in Angle Lake and there is no transit options to get from my house to the light rail other than a mile walk. I can drive to the park and ride in Tukwilla and try and find parking (all lots are full by 9am 700+ of them) to get to my job downtown at 11am.
The walk is 20 minutes, the drive to the PnR is about 10 then an additional 35min to King St. and another 10min walk to Pioneer Square and from door to door my commute is 25min by car door to door.
I pay $10 a day for parking and walk two blocks and just saved an hour and half on a daily commute. Yes I pay more twice the cost of an Orca card but I already have a car so why would I want to buy an Orca card in addition to my car and spend an additional hour and half in transit at 90bucks a month or have my car, a commute of less than 30 min and pay an additional 100 bucks I will take my car the four bucks a day is worth it.
The new Angle Lake station is great but without parking I will never use it and the 700+ spaces in Tukwilla are great but never available before 9am and if I were charged for either to park I would never even consider them as an option and always drive.

Parking around transit may encourage people to drive? Bullshit. You know what encourages people to drive? Not being able to get to transit. Here's the thing, I live about 1 mile from light rail. I'm not freaking walking there and back in the rain. The alternative is 3 bus transfers and an extra hour each way to my commute. No thanks. So, instead of driving my car 1 little mile each way a day to park and ride, I drive it 15 miles each way over lake WA, clogging the freeways. ST and the Blethens may not be right on most things, but like a broken clock, they are sometimes right twice a day. On this one, they're right.

Eh, I think that some of the eastside lightrails should have parking. I used to use the south kirkland PR and that was the only thing that made my commute into Seattle bearable. Otherwise, I'd be spending two hours a day on the bus which was hell for me. At that point it was almost worth paying the money to drive in just to save time and avoid the bus.

There needs to be a compromise between convenience and cost and time. If it takes too long to get to your destination via transit or you have to take too many buses, trains ect, people will just keep driving their cars which defeats the purpose of building a beautiful new light rail.

Yeah, I'm not sure where or how folks have been traveling, but nearly all light rail systems have parking at the ends of lines- London, Paris, Chicago. 'Inter-modal' has been the watchword in serious transit planning for many decades. This gives us an understanding that people need to move from all sorts of places, to all sorts of places, in all sorts of ways. Some will have cargo, some will have children, some will have physical limitations, some will be 2 income households living near one person's work, but forcing the other to commute. Maybe building massive parking structures in Cap Hill is a no-go? Or maybe the roofs of all stations should be 2-3 stories of parking just because?

@2 BART stations have parking. BART is not heavily used or functional. We are building the northern version of BART.

As many people have noted, the Seattle Times has a point. Parking makes sense at the terminus of a line. It may make sense at other locations. Places all over the country have parking for their commuter rail lines. These are places that (as people have noted) are sprawling, low population density areas, with little in the way of attractions. Of course parking there makes sense. But for the same reason, extending very expensive light rail into those places is nuts. Places like that are better served with cheap commuter rail or bus service. Bus service can extend to more neighborhoods, which means a lot more people will be able to access the station without driving at all --- and if they do drive, it will be a shorter one.

It remains to be seen what Sound Transit will suggest we build next time. But it is likely to be very much like BART. Except that BART serves cities many times the size of ours. So it is ludicrous to think that our version will work better. We are ignoring what works in other cities -- like our neighbor to the north, Vancouver -- and building something that doesn't work (like DART in Dallas). Except that unlike Dallas, we are spending a lot more money.

Just my personal experience, but i live in Burien and work near downtown. I would love to take light rail in, but the lack of parking makes it a non-starter for me, so i drive alone 5 days a week.

@2 You're misusing Chicago as an example here. Chicago has 8 L lines and nowhere near the housing market crush that we have. Furthermore, the L system connects to the Metra (suburban train service). I lived there for 5 years and even as a broke graduate student could afford to live a walking distance (1/2 mile) to the blue line. While the L doesn't have major park and rides, the Metra does - because you have to provide that if you want people in the suburbs to be able to use the system. You need a park and ride in Lombard if you want the commuter to get from Lombard into the loop where they work.