Since Car2Go is new in town, customers are still learning how it all works. The basic idea is easy enough, especially if you’ve ever tried Zipcar. You unlock (and lock) your Car2Go with a membership card waved over a windshield-mounted reader, pop inside, and after punching in your PIN on a dash screen, you’re off. But here are a few things you might not think about until they happen. Continue reading 4 Things to Know About Using Car2Go
The Port of Seattle is different from you and me. How’s that, you ask? Well, think of it this way. If you went in to work and spent $14 million illegally, you might expect there to be some repercussions when that was found out. Or if you checked your bank account and it had about $400,000 less than you expected, you might check into it. Continue reading Port of Seattle Rapped Again for Its Drunken Sailor Financials
The U Village powers-that-be decided to slap a slab on the project when it reached ground level, paint parking stripes on it, and resume work in January 2013, after the holiday shopping season. That’s now accomplished, but as you can see, people clearly don’t know about it. Parking is wide open. Continue reading Sighted! Empty Parking Spots at University Village
The idea puts some Seattle Times commenters ranters in a tight spot, where they have to portray this eminently capitalist solution to a supply-and-demand problem as “socialist” because it is being thought of by a transit agency. (The reverse is clearly true: Free parking is socialism.) But at first glance, it seems like this might hurt transit ridership, and wouldn’t that be a problem? Continue reading Would You Pay to Park & Ride? Should You?
The University Village shopping mall is having a Catch-22 moment: They’ve decided to pause construction of a six-story, 700-stall parking garage on the mall’s south side because of how it’s impacting parking, and, consequently, merchant business. Construction has meant the loss of hundreds of spaces in the work zone. Continue reading University Village Hits Brakes on Parking Construction, Trumpets Concert Series
These two findings are not necessarily contradictory. It’s possible that restaurants, lacking volume, have passed on higher prices to fewer customers, and gross receipts are up. It’s possible that the changes have created distinct winners and losers among restaurants. Many things are possible. But what we can be sure of is that gross receipts are up, which you wouldn’t assume was a bad thing, at first glance. Continue reading In Seattle, Parking is the Best of Times & Worst of Times
Let’s not let an unhappily-framed Times story set this debate, though, or we’ll be here all week, with precedent set for succeeding weeks. None of us has reason to suspect Chinatown restaurants of crying wolf over declining business–and the question of what’s causing the decline can be considered separately from what’s to be done about it. Blakeney himself mentions the impact from the “incredible amount of construction and loss of parking in South Downtown,” having to do with the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project. Continue reading Chinatown’s Paid Parking Mystery Continues to Unfold
