The Seattle City Council’s Sustainability and Transportation Committee recommended Tuesday afternoon that a pilot project for shared parking be considered by the full council.
The proposal involves three Capitol Hill Housing apartments, which house low-income residents. The plan offers residents subsidized Orca cards to ride public transit.
It also aims to develop sensor technology to count the number of cars sitting in those apartment garages at any given time.
Sensors already do this at downtown commercial garages, but applying that technology to small apartment complexes is very costly, said Alex Brennan, the senior planner at Capitol Hill Housing.
Brennan said the pilot program would allow them to create a similar system in their three garages to detect how many residents are leaving their parking spaces empty during business hours.
Eventually, they would use this data to determine how many spaces they could potentially lease to people who work nearby, for purposes of parking only during those hours when the resident’s car is not there. This relies on a system using unassigned spaces.
“I would be open to it as long as it’s cheaper than what I’m paying for parking every day,” said Danielle Hurst, who works as a hair stylist at RedX Hair Studio.
In front of their salon, street parking is $3 an hour, with a maximum two-hour limit before she would have to move her car. With that method, she could pay up to $50 a day.
One of the pilot program locations would be at Villa Apartments, across the street. Hurst could potentially then pay for monthly parking to use an empty space when a resident is not parking there during the day.
Currently, Hurst takes an Uber ride to and from work every day.
“It’s rare to find free or cheap parking at any time,” said Thomas Schugurensky, who goes to school nearby. He said he would take advantage of an available monthly parking spot too.
Brennan said that the goal would be to not restrict the times that a resident would want to park in the building.
However, if the resident’s parking hours were somehow restricted, the parking rate may become cheaper.
Cox Media Group
