Counterproductive Mayoral Ideas

Posted on | 3 years, 5 months ago, around lunchtime | No Comments

A couple of days ago I started seeing signs around my apartment for several blocks, indicating that we were not permitted to park, well, pretty much anywhere come August 24th or we’d be towed. The situation looked frankly desperate; we live in the most densely populated residential neighborhood in the city, and for the vast majority of us, there’s nothing but street parking available.

I expressed my concern and outright consternation to Ellen, with the added complaint of, “What am I supposed to do with the Sentra? Stuff it up my ass?” And that’s when Ellen told me about Mayor Nickels and his idiotic Car Free Days initiative.

Apparently, stunts like this are intended to “open up the streets for pedestrians” and “encourage residents to drive less.” We are hereby commanded by our clueless civic overlords to imagine what the streets would be like with fewer cars and embrace the resulting idyllic, emissions-free utopia. Apparently this utopia will be populated by loud festivities, street dancers, buskers, and bouncy castles.

Well Mayor Nickels, the thought of awakening every morning to loud festivities, street dancers, buskers, and bouncy castles makes me want to go buy another spare car or two just to preemptively clog the streets, thank you very much.

Under every normal situation apart from parades, streets are for vehicles, not people. And if the idea is to prevent cars from puttering around town, I can assure you that this initiative is a dismal failure. When about ten blocks (I am guestimating) around my home — and the homes of thousands of other people — are declared NO PARKING zones, WTF do you think happens to all the folks who park there every day? If you’re my husband, you spend half an hour driving around the hill, desperately trying to find a place to leave your car. If you’re me, you do all your driving errands the day before this farce, hoping to return home early enough to find a parking place within a mile of your apartment.* If you’re my neighbors, you do laps around the hill in your little red truck, swearing your way through the forest of NO PARKING signs.

I daresay several thousand other people have had similar experiences over the last 24 hours. And the great and terrible irony here is that the vast majority of car-owning people who live in this neighborhood … almost never drive those cars. My husband’s vehicle had been sitting in the same spot for a couple of weeks until he was forced to relocate it. My own car gets likewise left for days at a stretch. Most of my neighbors? Ditto. Therefore I shudder to calculate the additional driving miles heaped upon the Seattle area thanks to this preposterous little exercise in visionary motivation.

If the city leaders really wanted me to drive less, they’d do a better job of funding public transportation — which I am more than happy to make use of, when it’s actually running where I want to go, on a schedule that meets my needs. But this asshattery? This is absurd, and the mayor can bite me.

Later on tonight, I’m going to have to drive my car unnecessarily again and wander around trying to score yet another parking place. Because the only spot I could find yesterday was in a 2-hour zone, and if I’m still there come Monday morning, I’ll get a goddamned ticket.

[Edited to add: HA! After a couple of hours, the event was rained out. The streets are open once more.]


* Including errands I might have otherwise bused my way to, but since I had to move my car anyway, well, I drove around to some places that are within walking distance.

Category: misc

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