Why all the whining about parking? On my walk from the City HQ to the Harmon (UWT) I passed a dozen parking lots, many of which were half-filled at best. It seems to me Tacoma has all the parking it needs. Why do these lots sit half empty? People don’t want to walk the extra block or pay the extra buck.

The solution? Ask yourself WWPT? What would Portland do? Would they build more surface parking or would they build more mass transit? The answer is right under our collective nose.

My only comment is that “pay stations” apparently do not work for downtown parking on streets. Their use appears to be limited to parking lots with fairly long term parking.

After hiring consultants, purchasing expensive pay stations, and having a long public “educational” program and even having parking employees try to assist residents work the pay stations for over a week, Bellingham was forced to remove all of their pay stations earlier this year.

Here is an article on the issue:

CITY PLANS TO REMOVE PARKING METERS

Bellingham City Council

By Kristi Pihl (Western Front)

February 14, 2006

Bellingham City Council approved yesterday’s removal of LUKE, a new automated parking meter system, from the 1300 block of Railroad Avenue at an emergency city council meeting last Saturday.

Bellingham did end up removing the pay stations and replaced them with the meters that had been removed.

I think the issue for Tacoma is between what we have now and individual meters.

I believe either would work although having no meters is somewhat more inviting to potential shoppers.

(Crossposted on BIA blog)

Angled parking on Pacific has been a disaster for transit operating southbound. The angled spaces make it so every Humvee or Expedition backing out of a space blocks traffic for a period of time. Buses have to pull out of traffic to pick up passengers and pull back into traffic only to be stopped by additional cars pulling out.

The large number of parking spaces along Pac Ave encourages people to spin around and around and around Pac Ave, S. 21st, Jefferson and back to 17th and Pacific to find a space – generating abnormally high traffic.

I have to second Morgan’s slogan WWPD. Tacoma’s urban boosters look to Portland and Vancouver (BC) for how to design urban spaces. In Tacoma’s instance I think that transit downtown needs to link the eastern and western parts of downtown more efficiently. People will walk a few hundred feet horozontally, it’s these hills that are killing us.

We used to deal with this problem with a cable car loop that ran every two or three minutes or so.

Map of the old line

Tacoma Railway & Power Company – K St. Cable Car

Anybody make it to the meeting last night?