City considers new places, times to pay for Seattle parking

City officials are considering new parking hours in a Seattle neighborhood popular for its nightlife. Patrons will have to pay to play later into the night.

Seattle turning Capitol Hill street into Pac-Man mural

In Seattle Mayor Ed Murray’s proposed 2017-18 budget is a recommendation to increase paid parking hours on Capitol Hill and along the Pike/Pine corridor. It would increase the paid Seattle parking hours from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. in this area. As per usual, the city document is rather wordy — the proposal states:

The 2017 Proposed Budget, in addition to several rate adjustments up and down across [sic] the city and at different times of day, proposes for the first time an extension of evening paid parking from 8:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. in the Pike-Pine, Capitol Hill North and Capitol Hill South areas.

It became known that the mayor was considering an increase to paid parking hours in the city during a September council committee meeting. At that meeting SDOT’s parking program manager Mike Estey said that the department is using collected data to guide its management of Seattle parking. Demand for parking in that area remains high later into the night.

Estey said then:

We followed the data and found that there’s not some cliff that demand falls off at 5 or 6 p.m. Now, in most parts of the city we have parking extending to 8 p.m. In places like Pike, Pine and Capitol Hill where it looks like the data continues out, we’ve started to collect more data out to 10 p.m., 11 p.m. and midnight … that’s where the data shows there is still a lot of demand, occupancy is still high, and so those are the next places we’ll go to and look and see if we have access issues.

The mayor’s proposed budget is just that — a proposal. The city council has yet to vote , which it’s expected to before the end of the year.

New paid Seattle parking

It’s not just the Capitol Hill area that will see some changes to Seattle parking. The mayor is also proposing to flip the switch and turn free parking spots into paid parking. This will affect hundreds of spots in the Pike/Pine corridor and in South Lake Union.

The city is also converting several blocks of non-paid parking to paid parking in the Pike-Pine (150 spaces) and South Lake Union (136 spaces) areas in response to measured occupancy rates.

The added paid parking is expected to produce a 9 percent increase in revenue for the city, according to the mayor’s budget. Considering 2016-17, that would take revenue from $38.8 million to $42.3 million.

The mayor’s office is projecting 2018 revenue for on-street Seattle parking to be around $44.8 million.

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