Pioneer Square hit hardest by parking changes
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Pioneer Square hit hardest by parking changes

SDOT announced citywide changes to parking, but it seems like Pioneer Square is getting the worst of it. Sure, other neighborhoods are facing the same increases in rates and hours, but if we needed to, I’d be willing to pit our neighborhood against any of the others to see who is hurt worse.

Identified as a neighborhood with “peak occupancy” and an “active nightlife and high evening parking demand,” Pioneer Square is faced with on-street parking increases to $4/hour, as well as having our paid parking extended until 8 p.m.

City crews will begin implementing the new rates as of February 1, rolling them out neighborhood by neighborhood through March 30. The evening hours will roll out April and stay in effect through September.

Over the past months, SDOT collected “data” that reveals:

  1. On-street peak occupancy is highest in the neighborhoods of First Hill (100 percent), the Commercial Core (97 percent) and Pioneer Square (91 percent)

I have a call in to SDOT to make sure I’m understanding their numbers correctly, but if you actually look at the parking analysis that they did, the numbers stated don’t support the peak occupancy of 91%. That’s most definitely true [or worse]… during a football game, but the rest of the “unadjusted” occupancy percentages in the report are only between 57% and 66%. Only when they decided to adjust the rates did the 91% figure pop up.

[SDOT has posted maps from their analysis of Pioneer Square with details on occupancy during different hours of the day.]

As a resident, I have a few reactions to this:

  1. There couldn’t be a worse time to make these changes in Pioneer Square. This is going to hurt new residents thinking about moving in, current residents thinking about whether they should stay or not, and street level businesses who are trying their best to make it in a tough economic time. All this does is give more plausibility to everyone who has been saying that the city does nothing for our neighborhood.
  2. SDOT states the following objective: to “support neighborhood business districts by making on-street parking available and by encouraging economic development.” Instead, they are making it so that people will definitely no longer come to Pioneer Square to shop or eat. They’ll wait until after 8pm when parking is free and… oh wait, all of the restaurants and businesses are closed.
  3. In Pioneer Square, average physical occupancy (a car parked in a spot) was listed as 60%. Average paid occupancy for that spot? Only 39%. Do they really think these numbers are going to get better with rate and hour increases?
  4. We do not have an evening crowd. We have a nightlife crowd (which is definitely after 8pm). In fact, if you look at their parking analysis again, it states that Pioneer Square has only 57% occupancy in the hours between 6pm – 8pm.

It seems that the final numbers that they are reporting are not the same as the numbers found during the actual study. [deep breath] I am personally infuriated as I write this that the city didn’t take the struggles of our neighborhood into more consideration before including us in the “highest rates,” “longest hours” category.

Although there is nothing we can do about it now, these rates are supposedly only in effect for 2011, and will be looked at again this summer when determining rates for next year.

Although it doesn’t ameliorate these changes, an alternative action is to request that the city give us residential zoned parking spaces like they do in First Hill and other neighborhoods. The $40 – $50 charge a year can at least counteract some of the negative changes coming in the next month.

A second alternative can be found in this question… so at least for those of us who know our way around the city, we can pay for parking in another neighborhood, like Belltown (whose rates are dropping from $2.50 to $2), before driving to Pioneer Square to park.

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