Car payment (including depreciation): $283
Finance charges: $62
Insurance: $80
Gas: $78
License, registration, taxes: $45
Maintenance and tires: $46
Parking: $175

My real monthly totals:
Car payment: $0
Depretation: negligible
Finance charges: N/A
Insurance: Don’t remember the exact amount, but slightly less than their quote
Gas: $30 if I’m lucky
License/registration: Whatever tabs cost for the current year
Maintenance/tires: $10 maybe
Parking: $0

Their comparison assumes that I’m still paying off my car and that it costs me to park it. My car gets good mileage and due to its low odometer reading depreciates less than 10% a year. Since I drive it only a few times a month, I don’t need to change the tires very often. An oil change every few months is whatever the local parts store is charging for a quart.
Plus the annual fee effectively cancels out the money spent on tabs.

Personally I would have just taken a taxi or rented a car for a day or two. Zipcar is also an option but their program just doesn’t make sense for me. In any case even with cab fare and car rental costs I figure I come out ahead on owning a car I would rarely drive.

Besides with car rentals I can rent according to my needs and I get a reliable well-maintained vehicle for when I need to make a long road trip.

In fifteen years that development will be walking distance to two light rail stations. How many of the residents will need cars…?

I live in the U-District and would find it difficult to live without a car. I only use it a few times a month, but those few times I use are necessary. Just this past weekend I had to bring items to a BBQ. It would have been impossible by foot or transit. Other times I need to get places transit doesn’t go, or get there at times that transit doesn’t run.

But don’t think I’m anti-transit. I moved here in order to limit my driving. I walk to school, and use transit or walking for almost all errands.

Maximum parking requirements might help to alleviate financing issues a developer not coupling a significant amount of parking would likely face. If the developer is just following the regulations rather than leaving out parking in hopes of attracting “hippies” without cars, they may be less likely to receive flack from investors and banks. Just speculating.

I completely disagree. Investors, banks, and developers have no problem whatsoever with leaving out parking. More housing without wasting space for parking is more profit for the builders and the banks. If people really need parking, they’ll just take it from elsewhere in the neighborhood and impose costs elsewhere.

The people who have the problem are the neighbors, the neighborhood association, the stakeholders, the community. They don’t want it to become harder to park in their neighborhood, they don’t want their neighborhood transformed, they fear worse traffic, they fear crime with large apartment buildings where people don’t know each other, etc.

I’m in favor of higher density. But realize that in this case the developers and banks and money would love to build higher density; it’s way more profitable to stuff more housing on the same land. It’s the community and the environmental regulations and the zoning and all the involvement of the stakeholders in the process and other things that progressives usually love that prevent higher density.

That’s essentially what has happened with the real estate bubble.

The bubble is a problem of not building enough housing. So prices go up. Prices go up in Seattle, so they go up in the suburbs because people are comparing to what they’d pay in Seattle. But in the suburbs they let people build, so prices go down.

Prices are still too high in Seattle. We need more building, and we need lower prices. But once you have inflated house prices, you build a political constituency of home owners who want to keep them high (understandably). It’s a hard problem to get rid of.

Seattle’s high house prices are the result of years of zoning practices that keep density lower than it would be and force development to the suburbs.

If you do not have some form of personal transportation, your options for basic living are limited. If you can find a place that’s less than 6 blocks from a grocery store, you’re probably ok to forego an automobile.

That doesn’t explain why the Roosevelt neighborhood association is protesting building tall buildings directly beside the upcoming light rail station, though.

The city and the county needs to maintain a widespread commitment to density, and then “reward” the communities that support density with light rail. If you commit to the light rail stop first, then the community will still fight the density later. Perhaps make it a package deal, but I believe that if you have density, transit will come. The higher the density, the most significant the transit it can support.

Building transit first ends up with underused boondoggles like the Buffalo light rail.

There’s something to be said about the ability to just leave your car somewhere safe until you need to visit Grandma in Duvall or whatever and not have to worry about it. Which is why the shared parking you mentioned worked for me. I lived for a while in a mixed use building with a parking garage and just left the car down there for weeks at a time.

There’s not a huge downside to underground parking garages that I can see. They don’t take up any horizontal space, they don’t encourage sprawl the way parking lots do and they don’t diminish the walkability of a neighborhood the way the parking for townhomes does. Do they encourage car ownership? Some. But as I pointed out above, they also help people transition to using cars less. In 100 years if hardly anyone has a car, they might be empty, wasted spaces, but maybe the building could rent it out as storage or something.

The 39 is there, but with 45-minute frequencies it’s almost as bad as not having a bus at all. It reminds me of growing up in Bellevue in the 80s when the bus came once an hour, so if you missed it you had an hour to way, and you couldn’t do things spontaneously without it taking a long time to get into town. So you either waited, took another route (which may be the 7 in this case), drove, or didn’t go at all. If a lot of people don’t go at all, it means they’re not working or shopping or attending get-togethers, which is a loss to the entire economy and to the social dynamism of the city. And non-residents who unexpectedly find themselves in the area, who don’t happen to keep that route’s schedule in their pocket, don’t know what time the bus arrives till they get to the stop, at which point their options for making the waiting time useful are limited. (Note to Metro: there are four #106 stops in a row on Othello, none of them with schedules.)

I remember the first time I visited a friend on the top of Queen Anne in high school, being amazed that the 2 ran every 30 minutes (20 minutes midday), and was electric too. That seemed like the top of the world. Along with the fact that you could walk all over Queen Anne, and there were businesses every few blocks to go to, and if you had other friends there you could walk to their houses too and round several people up. But now that I’ve lived some more years and seen several transit systems, I’ve come to the conclusion that 15 minutes is really the minimum reasonable frequency to make a city well-functioning. 30 minutes, at least it’s something. Not good if you get off a train that comes every 10 minutes and then have to wait 30 minutes for a bus. 45 minutes, hmm, need some more funding….

The Othello-Seward Park-Alaska part of the route is still there, as the 39. The West Seattle part is gone, but that’s irrelevant to your point.

Othello is the same way, but that doesn’t bother me as much because that area has never had much there anyway. (Or to put it a more positive way, Othello has yet to assert its identity.) Othello from Rainier to MLK is all single-family homes, but the terrain is more wide and open so it’s more pleasant to walk, and there’s a large grassy park near the station. Three corners around the station have unbuilt condo projects (350 units each in two of them, and the third looks around the same size, so potentially 1000+ people when they’re built). Two of the condo lots are empty; one has an existing apartment building that’s still renting. The fourth corner is a Safeway. Behind one lot is the New Holly townhouses. So that all could conceivably become an Othello City someday. It will be kind of difficult to connect Othello-MLK to Othello-Rainer because the intervening houses really look like they belong there, so I guess they’ll have to evolve as two separate villages.

All this points to the important role of the Alaska & Othello bus to connect these areas. Elderly people can’t walk five minutes uphill, and most people don’t want to walk through no-man’s-lands, so a frequent circulator would make a big difference in terms of making the stations more useful. The Othello – Seward Park – Alaska – West Seattle bus that was axed would have been excellent. I home Metro’s long-term finances don’t stay so bad that they can’t put it on someday.

As for the 30 empty storefronts on Rainier mentioned in one of the newspaper articles, I don’t think you can blame that on the train. The ones on MLK, yes. But MLK is too far from Rainier to have much of a direct effect, unless you say that all those former customers used to drive down from Beacon Hill and now don’t because it’s so hard to cross MLK, but that’s kind of ridiculous because there aren’t that many people living up there anyway, and those that do can take the 3+ major cross-streets that still go through.

This metro region as a whole may not be dense, but there are pockets of density that are well beyond what is needed to support a car-free lifestyle. And, btw, I do live within 6 blocks of a fully functioning grocery store, along with another 15,000 people on Capitol Hill. I also use zipcar once every two weeks to do shopping at Costco, so I have no trouble getting groceries or anything else for that matter without owning a car in this neighborhood.

However, senior living centers are one type of development which could probably get waivers to reduce parking requirements and be financially profitable. With the flower power generation starting to retire I bet there’s a lot of demand for such units in say the U-Dist. rather than the more traditional lower Queen Anne.

It’s really pretty simple. Empty buses don’t do anybody any good.

The developer still gets financing, because the project as a whole has the parking spaces the finance company wants to see, but those parking spaces aren’t thrown in as “free” with each unit. Unit owners who want parking have the choice to buy a parking space. Unit owners who don’t want parking have the choice to save the cost of a parking space.

After the initial unit sales, the association can choose whether to sell remaining parking spaces to non-unit-owners or keep title to them and rent parking by the month to non-unit-owners. (Usually not hourly parking — monthly parking rental is more compatible with secured parking garages.) If the association decides to sell off excess spaces, neighbors without off-street parking in their own buildings are often among the buyers.

When a unit owner decides to sell their unit, any parking space they have can be sold with the unit, or it can be sold separately. If they’re sold together, the new unit owner still has the choice to sell the parking space if they don’t want it. If the association doesn’t sell spaces to outsiders, then the excess space can be sold back to the association, or auctioned to other unit owners.

All of that allows a development to have “enough” parking spaces for financing requirements while still exposing unit owners to the cost of parking separately from the cost of housing.

FWIW, this system can also work in lower-density developments, like garden-style townhouse condos, where on-site surface parking can be a huge part of the total land cost of the development.

Finally, it doesn’t take much cost to influence parking choices. I park at a commuter near the Auburn Sounder station for $20/month. Many people will spend time and gas every day finding free on-street parking further away from the train station, rather than buying a monthly parking pass. Personally, I look at the stress reduction of having guaranteed parking and a fixed time to get to the platform, and I’d sooner give up my morning coffee if I really needed to save $20/month.