Trying to park on-street downtown, or in neighborhoods with active bar and nightlife scenes, is a battle. According to the Seattle Department of Transportation, "downtown street parking is at 100 percent capacity for most of the day," says Marybeth Turner, a spokeswoman for SDOT, and along Broadway, street parking is roughly 70 percent full during the afternoon and 100 percent full in the evening.

This means on an average day, drivers can't find street parking in popular areas without circling for an indefinite period of time. The reasons behind this are a simple: at $2.50 an hour, parking is too cheap—there's no incentive for drivers to move.

So faced with gridlock parking downtown, Mayor Mike McGinn proposed raising parking rates from $2.50 to $4.00 an hour for on-street parking, and raising neighborhood rates 50 cents to help fill the city's $67 million budget shortfall and pay for our city's police, fire department, parks, and libraries (among other public services).

The Downtown Seattle Association is concerned that higher rates will cause businesses to atrophy, die, fossilize. They write in a September 30 letter to city council members, "The proposed 60 percent increase... would make Seattle one of the most expensive cities in the country in which to park."

But expense isn't the issue here, it's availability. Donald Shoup, a UCLA professor of Urban Planning (and the author of the 733-page tome “The High Cost of Free Parking”) says that cities should have 15 percent of their on-street parking available during peak hours. More people will find parking when they need it, closer to their destinations. This creates healthier business districts and healthier cities in general.

For example, recent studies in Park Slope, New York, and San Francisco show that in areas where parking is maxed out (similar to downtown Seattle) 25 to 40 percent of vehicles on the road were simply circling for parking. In 2007, Transportation Alternatives (a biking, walking, and transit advocacy group in New York) found that 45 percent of Brooklyn neighborhood traffic was cruising for a parking space, so the city jacked up street parking rates to meet Shoup's targeted 15 percent parking vacancy. This cut down on traffic and exhaust while bringing in more money for the city. (The rate jump, in this case, was from 25 cents to $1.50 during peak hours, which some will point out is much cheaper than Seattle's proposed $4.00 rate. But, again, cheapness isn't the issue—the goal is to strike a balance between downtown parking demand and generating funding for public services that make downtown safe and enjoyable, e.g. a healthy police presence and kick-ass library).

More parking arguments after the jump!

Critics argue that our bike-humping mayor is blindly driving cars into extinction. Bellevue—that beautiful Eastside mecca fat with shopping malls and free street parking—will take the crown as Washington's cultural and business hub.

But McGinn's proposal wasn't a freewheeling impulse. The Seattle Department of Transportation sent a study to the city budget office and the mayor's office in July that studied the effects of three separate rate increases (from $2.50 to $3, $4, and $5). The study concluded that an increase to $4 an hour would create more downtown parking turnover and keep roughly nine percent of street-spots vacant at any given time—well below Shoup's golden 15 percent (versus SDOT's estimates of two percent availability for $3 and 19 percent for $5). While SDOT's study doesn't mention Shoup, it does name-check San Francisco. After a four-year citywide study of parking trends, the city has come up with the nation's most innovative parking program, which adjusts parking rates according to peak on- and off-hours, within a range of 25 cents to $6 an hour. The SDOT report concludes that a jump to $4.00 is the first step in a parking tax system similar to San Francisco's, where "the SDOT director can nimbly respond to changing parking demand conditions by adjusting parking rates." In September, our city rolled out e-Park signs on six downtown parking garages that list the number of available spaces for downtown shoppers. Following San Fransisco's lead on adjustable parking rates is the next step to improving our downtown core.

When reached by phone last week, McGinn said, "If we can raise the rates and collect more dollars—act like a business—which conservatives like Kemper Freeman [King Lord developer of Bellevue] are asking us politicians to do all the time, we'll have money to support public services. That’s what attracts people to downtown—a safe place with good parks and vibrant sidewalks and walkability... We win in the long run."