Seattle City Councilman Peter Steinbrueck wants to make it harder for customers to park near neighborhood businesses:
But the aim, he said, is to turn neighborhood business areas into verdant urban villages to which people could walk, rather than drive.Personally, I prefer walking to driving. I typically walk 3-4 miles a day, which is more than I drive. I would enjoy having an "urban village" to walk to. HOWEVER, I would drive in unpleasant weather, if taking children, or when I expect to buy more merchandise than I can comfortably carry home. Also, Seattle, at 6,821 people per sq. mile, is not nearly as dense as the cities (New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco) that have historically supported neighborhood business districts primarily with foot and transit traffic."We want to advance good environmental policy, improve transit, bicycling and walking, and hopefully become less car-dependent in the future than we are today," Steinbrueck said
I think the most likely consequence of transit non-user Steinbrueck's anti-car temper tantrum will be to entice customers to forego parking-challenged neighborhood businesses and drive farther away to malls and big box stores where parking is convenient and predictable. In short: people will actually end up driving more, and fewer neighborhood businesses will remain viable.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at December 08, 2006 10:34 AM | Email ThisI assume you could ride a city bus and see them all on board, saving the environment by riding the bus to the council meetings.
Right?
Posted by: Larry on December 8, 2006 11:03 AM
Hint: Steinbrueck drives. more than anybody else on the Council.
Personally, I would not go to a business that does not have parking. I suppose if I lived in a neighborhood with a business within walking distance and only needed to pick up one or two things, I would go there, but that's about it. But it is up to the business whether to adhere to it, so if they want to rely on mostly local foot traffic for their profits, that's up to them.
Posted by: Palouse on December 8, 2006 11:14 AMI suspect that what these Utopian leftists really want is to surround themselves with fellow Utopians that put some sort of aggrandized futuristic, and fanciful view in place as soon as possible at the expense of convenience, economic feasibility, truly diverse income range, and personal choice.
Sounds like just a fantasy that hopes that all evil neocons who like cars and backyards and Bush will just move away from the city in their gas guzzling SUVs so that the leftists can be left alone in their urban villages to live happily ever after. Whatever.
Posted by: Jeff B. on December 8, 2006 11:15 AMFantasy? I think that's pretty close to reality. Would the last conservative to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?
Posted by: Palouse on December 8, 2006 11:19 AMBesides it's not about reducing traffic and meeting housing/office space needs. It's about allowing housing and office space where parking spaces should be in order to reap the taxes housing and offices will rake in.
And people want to believe the City Council and Nickel$ are at odds.
Posted by: Tyler Durden on December 8, 2006 11:23 AM- ronin (free market capitalist pig -- and proud of it!)
Posted by: ronin551 on December 8, 2006 11:26 AMWe need a new annual bicycle state license tab, $30 to $45, for of public roads in our State. This tax will require bikers to pay something towards the cost of their incessant demands for more segregated lanes and other accomdations.
Also, bikes are a major cause of urban traffic congestion because of their slow speed and the same road status as cars. Maybe all bike users should pay $60/year.
It is both fair and reasonable for bike users to begin to share the cost burden for use of public roads.
Posted by: Paddy on December 8, 2006 11:50 AMWhat this dingbat fails to consider is that citing cities that were fair sized before the days of affordable autos is comparing apples to oranges. You look at the post-auto development around these examples and you don't see much of the "quaint urban villages" concept.
A more pressing matter for the council would be development of a plan to extract their heads from their behinds instead of telling us how to live.
Posted by: Burdbabee on December 8, 2006 12:12 PMThe council is eliminating a mandate.
I always thought Republicans did not like business regulations and mandates.
I guess that is only true if the mandate does not support Stefan's narrow roads agenda.
And no offense to his urban hardware store business, but I drive several miles, past an Ace Hardware to go to Harbor Freight Tools, where the $20 hammer he is selling is less than half of the cost.
Posted by: Palouse on December 8, 2006 12:22 PMActually he is not proposing a "world-class city" but a city concept based upon a European socialist (cum Richard Florida) model -- the other little detail that our urban planners are forgetting is HIGH PAYING INDUSTRIAL JOBS --
Posted by: Lew on December 8, 2006 12:31 PMhttp://www.ti.org/va.html
The APA recomends that their members read it, and not because they agree with O'Toole. They loath the guy, but they know that his argument is sound and will defeat them unless they are extra well prepared to refute him. Even when well prepared they seldom prevail when they go up against him or people who oppose them using well documented and reaasoned arguments.
Here's what the American Planning Association had to say about the book in their review: "The review's concluding paragraph sums it up:
"O'Toole in 2001 looks a lot like Jane Jacobs did in 1961. They're both outsiders with a detailed grass-roots view of how planners -- with the best of intentions -- are following a fashion into disaster. If smart growth is to be more than a recapitulation of the urban-renewal catastrophe, then its advocates will publicly engage O'Toole with facts and arguments. If they ignore him, or if they brush him off as a libertarian fanatic with no credentials, then we can be pretty sure that he's on to something."
Posted by: JDH on December 8, 2006 12:51 PMThe council is eliminating a mandate.
I always thought Republicans did not like business regulations and mandates.
Which is why Palouse previously wrote:
it is up to the business whether to adhere to it, so if they want to rely on mostly local foot traffic for their profits, that's up to them.
The free market couldn't take care of this, because zoning codes required businesses to provide parking spaces. Now the free market will be permitted to function.
Posted by: Bruce on December 8, 2006 03:09 PMThe point is the city is actively making it more difficult to drive in the city and proposing less parking for new residential developments. They intend to control our use of the automobile, first in downtown and then citywide. After all, they are good liberals.
Posted by: Bill Cruchon on December 8, 2006 05:36 PMThankfully most of them will be rat-holed via the Smart Growth model in a centrally planned Downtown Seattle featuring a honeycoomb of urban highrises. Couldn't happen to a nicer group of folks. Hey maybe we can start talking about a significant Toll for everyone trying to escape from the Socialist Utopia to some suburban Dacha? Works in Moscow right?
Posted by: Smokie on December 8, 2006 05:53 PMThey do it in their own literature. Read it, or read the book I reffered you to. What they do is champion congestion which makes the alternative more attractive. This is documented quite extensively in the literature which they circulate amongst themselves, but nowhere to be seen in what they "feed" to the unwashed masses. As with most issues the explanation someone gives will be shallow, therefore allowing you many avenues of attack and I am not going to be baited into a neverending refutatiun point by point. Which is, by the way, another "tool" taught in Urban Planning curriculem in their classes ealing with "controling" public outreach sessions to reach the "desired" outcome.
Posted by: JDH on December 8, 2006 06:40 PMNow.
Posted by: Tyler Durden on December 9, 2006 02:04 PMAllowing new shops to come in and start doing business without ensuring that there is parking available when the business will generate parking is not "free market." It is Irresponsible.Tacoma does this and it is F'n IRRESPONSIBLE, not only that it is unfair to existing businesses in the area. It is not fair for to allow a new business to just show up and TAKE ADVANTAGE OF PARKING INFRASTRUCTURE that existing businesses have paid for or, in many cases, actually built themselves.
Posted by: JDH on December 9, 2006 03:59 PM
Personally, I don't walk anywhere that I couldn't drive. I drive to my mailbox and it's only 50' from my front door. The more convenient it is for me to do this, the more I'm likely to frequent the business, restaurant, shop, etc.
Screw you, Seattle - I guess you don't want my business. What you're creating is a mecca for panhandling drug addicts and drunks that someone would have to walk through with their children in order to shop. What's so 'progressive' about that?