I recently took a tour of the parking options of downtown Tacoma with a good friend of mine, Joe Korbuszewski. We will call him Willy. Willy works at Paddy Coyne’s, which as I’m sure you know is a restaurant on the north end of Pacific Avenue in downtown Tacoma. If my friend Willy works during the day he can either park his car in a one hour zone and pay a ticket- with revenue going to the Traffic Division of the Public Works Department, or another option is he can spend five minutes out of every hour looking for a new spot to park in. Wouldn't it be better if he could park close to work and refill a meter every three hours? Or how about if he parked further away and paid for more hours at a slightly lower rate? This is something that could only be found within the pages of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, right?



No, they didn't have parking meters in 1516. But this phenomenon does exist — and it exists in our state capital.



If you are ever looking for parking in Olympia between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, you will see something a little different — green, silver, and yellow domes. The green-domed meters allow you to park for three hours at a cost of 50 cents/hour; Silver-domed meters allow you to park for nine hours at a cost of 35 cents/hour; and finally, for a penny, nickel, or dime, a Yellow-domed meter will allow you to park for a maximum of 15 minutes. This tactic allows Jah Dennis-Love at Trippy Glass Smokeshop to park a little further away for nine hours while he works and at the same time provides the local High School calculus teacher with three hours to decipher whether or not he is in the market for a triple-hosed gravity bong crafted in the shape of a melting mushroom.



It's just too bad there isn't a professor of urban planning who has presented irrefutable evidence that such parking tactics can work.



Wait a minute…



Prof. Donald Shoup is the professor of Urban Planning at UCLA and the lead authority on parking in the United States. His book, The High Cost of Free Parking, is the vibrating teddy bear for parking ravers around America. In his book, Shoup states that the market price of metered parking should be set so that, on average, 15 percent of all parking spots will be vacant. Broken down, this means that one out of every seven spots should be available to increase consumer traffic and therefore increase private investment, property values, and sales tax revenues. By having the metered parking price set high enough that a 15 percent vacancy is attained you can in turn decrease “cruising” for spots which will decrease pollution from emissions as well as decrease congestion and energy use.



A case study, also performed by Dr. Shoupey Doopey-Doop, entitled Turning Small Change Into Big Changes, was done in the fall of 2003 and focused on the parking situation in Old Pasadena, which is now a major shopping area for local consumers. Pasadena didn't have any parking meters until 1993 and consumers, as well as employees, had to move their cars every two hours if they wanted to park downtown. Still, the idea of metered parking was met with great opposition until the city compromised.  The city proposed that all of the revenue collected from metered parking would go directly back into the city’s general fund as well as into public amenities such as cleaning the sidewalks, planting street trees, and ensuring security for the businesses and citizens within the district. BA-ZING! In 2001, Old Pasadena's parking revenue was $1.2 million.



With 690 parking meters, each green goblin electronic plastic devourer took in around $1,712! The meter revenue pays for public improvements, which in turn attract more visitors who pay for curb-parking which in turn makes more meter revenue available to pay for more public improvements. Catch that? It’s a circle of happiness and prosperity.



The bottom line is something has to be done about the parking situation facing downtown Tacoma. Immediately. We need parking meters. Downtown businesses are suffering and we are creating a wasteland of consumerism. Act now! Our city can't afford to lose any more visitors to ridiculously outdated parking regulations and procrastinating bureaucrats.