In a real shift from past practices, the City of Seattle is adjusting parking rates based on observed on-street data from each neighborhood and a goal oriented methodology on availability. Moving to an outcome based approach, the City’s goal is to set rates so that turnover occurs and motorists can reliably find one to two open spaces on average per block.
Mayor McGinn and the Seattle City Council asked SDOT to take a hard look at its data and methodology to ensure that 2011’s rates achieve this goal. Based on a thorough review of the rate setting approach, rates for 2011 will go up in four neighborhoods, down in 11 neighborhoods and will stay the same in seven others as compared to 2010 rates. So 73 percent of paid spaces will have either no change or a rate reduction. Click here for a chart showing the revised 2011 on-street parking rates.
The most significant revision made during the review was to adjust our target occupancy range to 71-86 percent, instead of the previously used 58-78 percent. This better corresponds to the seven spaces per block found on average in Seattle’s paid parking neighborhoods.
SDOT will roll these new rates out over the course of two months starting in early February on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. We’ll follow up this spring and summer with additional data collection to see how the new rates are changing paid parking use on Seattle’s streets.
Click here for a map of revised 2011 on-street parking rates.