Parking Extortion
Write a story about parking in Seattle and you open the floodgates for readers who tell of endless circling, faulty meters, thieving kiosks, and bitch about a city government planning to extend this mistery 24/7 (to regulate parking round the clock, you see, not to rake in millions more in revenue). Among the recent e-mailers was Chuck Reichert, who lives in Bellevue and sings with the St. James Cathedral choir on First Hill, where he notes the city has recently installed an array of "dreaded" kiosk pay stations. Says Reichert:
The meters were activated in the Fall, 2006 and the fun began. Frye Museum and Puget Sound Blood Center have off-street parking and O'Dea High School does, too. The cathedral has limited off-street parking and you could pay to park in the Cabrini Medical Center lot on Monday through Saturday. The garage is free on Sundays. Last Saturday two priests were ordained at the cathedral. This is an annual event that fills the church with the families of those being ordained, 140 or so priests, about 100 musicians and many parishioners, and creates parking chaos. The ceremony is about 2-1/2 hours long. The meters are only good for two hours. You can be as sure as daffodils are yellow that parking enforcement showed up exactly two hours after the service started. The lady was still writing tickets when we came out at the end of the service. For the visitors, this was a cruel joke.
Adds Reichert, about the densely packed commercial and residential hill: "I would hate to live there if I didn't have a dedicated parking spot. Now they are talking about 24-hour paid on-street parking. Won't that make life interesting? Well, if the mayor and city council in Seattle think my friends and I from the Eastside are going to bus down for an evening at Elysian Brewing or any of those other good places, they are mistaken. I can just as easily spend my money on the Eastside and not have to pay the extortion."
8 comment(s)
menance says:
The only thing worse than parking in Seattle is driving in Seattle - discourteous and deranged people from QA and Madison Park zooming up on your ass in those big SUVs, for starters. And on a hot day like today, with middle fingers at the ready!
Posted On: Wednesday, Jul. 11 2007 @ 10:06AM
seattleite says:
Parking is difficult in Seattle for a reason: IT\'S A CITY. If you don\'t want to walk more than 25 feet in a day, feel free to stay on the Eastside. Isn\'t willful law-breaking a little anti-Christian, anyway?
NO-REBUILD option for the 520 bridge, please.
Posted On: Wednesday, Jul. 11 2007 @ 1:40PM
Arthur Stone says:
I keep forgetting about our constitutional rights to cheap gas and free parking.
Silly me.
What better use of city right of ways than the storage of motor vehicles?
And thanks to Rick Anderson for working \'the mayor\' into yet another whine.
Posted On: Wednesday, Jul. 11 2007 @ 2:53PM
Brad says:
While I don\'t believe the city should charge at all after hours, at least on evenings and weekends they could expand the maximum purchase time beyond 2 hours. That way you could go to a bar on Saturday night and not have to leave intermittently to re-pay and travesties like that ordination wouldn\'t occur anymore.
Posted On: Wednesday, Jul. 11 2007 @ 5:02PM
trueblue says:
With the mayor being chauffered 100 miles a day (including to and from home), the city needs to charge for parking 24/7 to pay his gas bill. But one question: Will SPD\'s parking enforcement officers be working around the clock, too, ticketing your car while you sleep? Parking\'s a game but that\'s out of bounds.
Posted On: Thursday, Jul. 12 2007 @ 8:41AM
Patrick says:
Public parking is not a right. It is a privilege. If someone can\'t obey the rules we set for our streets they should quietly pay the ticket or take a bus, cab, or bike instead. There are plenty of options out there.
Posted On: Thursday, Jul. 12 2007 @ 10:27AM
dhsea says:
If this is a regular event (annual in this case), don\'t take the chance, hire a parking service to take care of it... park for the duration of the event without worry.
Posted On: Friday, Jul. 13 2007 @ 5:34PM
Jeanie Shipman says:
My husband and I will be comming to Seattle in about a week. We are staying at a motel on Aurora Ave.North. Where will be the best place to find parking so we can visit the space needle and Pike Place Market? Sounds like parking is a problem
Posted On: Monday, Apr. 14 2008 @ 12:07PM