Green Bleak, Next to Bleakish Green

[from 10/6/10]

“McGinn has said higher prices for street parking would free up parking slots more often, so drivers would circle the block less, reducing congestion and emissions” -- random excerpt from a Seattle Times article on the subject.

Hooboy! But you have to love his commitment, don’t you? He’s all up in there!

Let’s see if we can do the math ourselves. Never mind raising the parking fee from $2.50 per hour to $4 per hour. Let’s push the argument to its limit and say the fee has gone to $150 per hour. That’s 60 times the old rate and a nice round Babylonian multiplier that happens to be the number of minutes in an hour.

So you could figure that if people were stretched financially to the limit, by, say, a recession, then they would park only minutes downtown when before they had parked hours. What will drivers do differently? Will they circle the block more? Will there be less congestion? No! They’d just park and not pay and wait in the spot they’re in for the tow truck to arrive, because parking on impound lots is cheaper!

Seriously, why should we subsidize the middle-men? Let’s just do away with street-side parking altogether and get people to drive their cars onto the impound lots themselves. It will adversely impact the tow truck industry, but they’ll get over it. OK, I’m projecting. I’ll get over it.

With everyone parking on the impound lots, collecting for tickets for overtime parking will be easy, because the lot will still hold your car hostage. Which means you’ll still be parked, so it’s a win-win!

I wish Mayor McGinn had consulted me, I have so many brilliant ideas for how to improve the parking situation in this city, I could have spared him the embarrassment of revealing his.

For example, here’s one that was inspired by a short story I must have read in the New Yorker before I was born. The whole idea is to raise $20 million more for the city to spend. What we do is, we let everyone park anywhere they can. Then January 1 we pick a parking space at random and charge the owner of the car in it $20 million. If they’re rich enough, and they can pay, great, we’re done for the year, nobody else has to pay. If they can’t pay, we stone them, use them to fertilize our crops and appease the Arugula Goddess, and then we repeat the process January 2. And so on.

Eventually, either someone will pay for all our parking for the remainder of the year, or all the stoning will be a disincentive to parking, which will result in more bus and bicycle use, less congestion and less fumes, and an all around greener city. Bleak, but a green bleak. Greenish-bleak is a gorgeous color, now available in boxes of 256 crayons.

Here’s another idea that’s better than the mayor’s: Bidding!

That’s right, we auction space off! All the street parking is to be paid for annually. You want to park on the street in a formerly metered space? You purchase an annual permit and you can display it to park anywhere, anytime. The catch is there’s only going to be a tenth as many permits as drivers that want them, so we’ll auction them off one-by-one. Get yours early ‘cause the last few are going to be really pricey!

I’m on a roll! How about this? We go ahead and we outdo the mayor and charge a whole $10 an hour per space, but we’re tricky about it -- we make one area of downtown absolutely free every day. This doesn’t solve anything except for the lucky stiffs who get there early and hog a space all day, but it gives everyone else hope that they’ll be lucky some day, too. Welcome to Seattle, the City of Hope!

One more: You want drivers to circle the blocks less? Make them pay a turn permit!