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The city announced its new parking rates today, and parking near Swedish Hospital’s Cherry Hill campus and along 12th Ave from Madison to Cherry is set to go from $1.50 per hour to $2. Downtown prices will go up to $4 per hour, while many neighborhoods saw a decrease in parking costs.
According to SDOT, the new rates were set in order to encourage more parking turnover in areas where usage is constantly full. The city’s on-street parking goal is to leave a spot or two open on every block (around 80 percent full):
To develop its report, SDOT conducted assessments of every neighborhood containing on-street paid parking. Over the past months, SDOT collected data that reveals:
-On-street peak occupancy is highest in the neighborhoods of First Hill (100 percent), the Commercial Core (97 percent) and Pioneer Square (91 percent)
-On-street peak occupancy is lowest in the Uptown Triangle (29 percent), Denny Triangle North (42 percent), and Belltown North (46 percent) neighborhoods
The city is considering a demand-based parking rate system that would charge different rates throughout the day. That system could be in place as early as 2012.
Does anyone have info on how streets around Cherry and 20th have received zoned parking (a recent addition, I believe)? Between downtown workers parking & grabbing the bus to work & hospital employees/visitors, 20th avenue is becoming very full of non resident day time parkers…. Thinking a rate increase might encourage more.
Lola,
There as a post on this blog about this very subject a little while back:
http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/2009/08/18/the-swedish-pa
Apparently you have to get 60% of your neighbors to agree in order to start the process:
http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/parking/parkingrpz_how
Good luck!
Thank you, Frank! I’ll check it out and see if our street is interested.
Cheers!
We live on 21st, just off of Cherry, and were actually originally against the plan that eventually did make our block a permit parking area. We had felt that as tax paying citizens, it is not fair to block us from parking in other Seattle neighborhoods, nor to block others wishing to park on our block. We had started experiencing parking issues only as other neighborhoods around us implemented the permit parking ( seemed to have pushed these out of area folks to move more into our block for parking ). Once we went to the permit parking, our street opened back up to local permitted parking, and usually is pretty empty most mornings through early afternoonss.