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Last Friday’s excellent Vancouver Sun story put a much needed spotlight on traffic trends on the Golden Ears Bridge—which are running so far behind projections that Translink now forecasts that the agency will lose between $35 and $45 million each year on the bridge for at least the next several years. But the story is really just the tip of iceberg in a much larger story about Greater Vancouver’s transportation finance woes....

Imagine if you could put a meter in front of your house and charge every driver who parks in “your” space. It’d be like having a cash register at the curb. Free money! How much would you collect? Hundreds of dollars a year? Thousands? How might all that lucre shift your perspective on local parking rules? The idea of a private meter (already available on eBay)—or a variant of it...

There are places in this world the savvy traveler would never drive with any hope of finding street parking: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, for example, or just about anywhere in downtown Los Angeles. That’s what you might think, anyway. If you actually drive to Fisherman’s Wharf today, though, you will have no problem finding a curb spot. A space will offer itself on each nearby block, if you’re willing...

Despite seriously questioning the need for a taxi demand study in Seattle (we don’t estimate demand for pizza delivery or dentists before deciding how to regulate them), the fact that the city did one anyway and now has interesting data from it does excite my heart a little. And there are some interesting tidbits in the study, which a council committee commissioned to help wrap its mind around what’s happening...

In Peggy Clifford’s neighborhood, out back of the State Capitol in Olympia, Washington, a black market thrives. Early each year during the state’s legislative session, lobbyists go there—just a hop, skip, and a jump from the capitol dome—to buy what they crave: parking spaces. Peggy says, “This is a neighborhood, not a parking lot.” Tell that to regular Capitol visitors. The neighborhood may be nationally registered as historic and staunchly...

“My sister has great food karma. She finds great food, and she never pays.” If you heard someone say that, you’d just scratch your head. What could that mean? Does she dumpster dive? If you substitute the “parking” for “food,” though, it makes sense. Indeed, a friend said those exact words to me recently, so I started asking others about their parking karma. Everyone I asked knew exactly what I...

Editor’s Note 8/19/2015: We are bringing this popular and relevant post back to explain how parking rules raise your rent. Two years later, Sightline’s executive director Alan Durning is still exposing the hidden reason behind skyrocketing housing costs in this recent Stranger article. Read below to learn how ending parking quotas can bring down rent costs. Have you ever watched the excavation that precedes a tall building? It seems to take forever. Then,...

Last week I wrote about my experience commuting to work with Yellow Cab vs. Lyft, one of the new on-demand, smartphone-based “ridesharing” services that have recently started operating in Seattle. Personally, my experience with Lyft was much more efficient and pleasant. But that leaves out some important points for policymakers attempting to craft sensible regulations for a growing car-for-hire industry. For starters, I’m fortunate enough to have the option of...

Off-street parking quotas are on the books in every city in Cascadia, because they are politically expedient. But the specific quotas—two spaces per apartment or ten per 1,000 square feet of retail floor space, for example—are based on little or nothing. Cities just make them up, then state them with precision, as UCLA professor of urban planning Donald Shoup has documented in The High Cost of Free Parking (see chapter...

Maybe the inventors of Monopoly were onto something when they called their second most expensive property Park Place, because car storage is surprisingly costly. We think of it as cheap, because we so rarely pay for parking at the time when we are using it. More than 90 percent of the time, our cars end their trips in spaces for which there is no charge. But just because we’re not...