‘Shocking’ incompetence is great opportunity to kill SDOT program

Until the end of 2016, vanpool permits in the City of Seattle were $20 a year. It was an incredibly small amount of money in order to park the vanpool on the street.

Awesome. When you look at how expensive it is to actually find parking in downtown Seattle, that’s a good deal.

Then came the report Tuesday that the Seattle Department of Transportation jacked up the parking permits for the program to $800 a year. Yes, 800 dollars a year! That is a 4,000-percent increase.

And, by the way, it’s going to get worse. In 2018, the price will double to $1,600. In 2019, it bumps to $2,400 a year.

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This is where it gets fascinating. When you’ve got numbers like this that are clearly shocking, any normal person would be like ‘What the hell is wrong with you?” But then you’ve got Mike Estey, SDOT’s manager for parking programs. To him, it’s actually pretty reasonable.

“When you compare it to off-street parking rates, to the rates to park downtown in Seattle, $66 a month is still a pretty good deal,” Estey told KOMO News.

“Hopefully, it’s not overly burdensome. It still represents a pretty good deal to park on-street in downtown Seattle.”

Burdensome? Nah. Why would that be? But what I love even more about this story is why SDOT did it. According to the report, the reason is that the vanpool system hasn’t paid for itself in decades. That charged price was always super low, and they never updated the costs. So all of a sudden they’ve decided, “OK, we’ve been mismanaging this thing for decades. Let’s all of a sudden increase the rates.”

I’m sorry, but if you knew what you were doing in your job, this would not have happened. You would have done incremental increases over a longer period of time so that we’re not going from $20 to $800, which is just horrible PR.

SDOT incompetence leads to opportunity

When we look at this number, we should all be shocked by the incompetence coming from SDOT. This is a remarkable example of them simply not understanding how to govern. But since we are making changes anyway, we should take the opportunity to kill this program.

Look at how many vanpools are actually participating: 700. That’s all we are talking about. The program is not taking that many cars off the roads. I also don’t believe that all those people who are partaking in the vanpools would otherwise be driving solo. That is just an assumption that we make.

Then again, maybe SDOT is right. Let’s use their silly logic. Let’s say you were to go out and buy a Tesla and drove it by yourself everyday. Or if you didn’t know how to drive, think about the costs to charter a helicopter to pick you up from the landing pad on your apartment high rise in Belltown.

By those measures, the vanpool is still a tremendous deal! Thanks for reminding us it’s all perspective, no matter how silly.

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