Today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer proffers a fairly absurd Scripps Howard wire service story that plays to our local electorate's social engineering impulses. It hypes an urban planning professor's claim that easy parking is a social evil.

UCLA urban planner Donald Shoup wants cities to require fewer parking spaces in conjunction with new development, and says it's socially irresponsible to make parking easy for people. And there's entirely too much free parking in the U.S., he asserts.

I'd love for this ivory-tower seer to join me circling this block, and that block, and then this other block here, in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, the International District, or Leschi. You can barely find paid or metered parking in many parts of Seattle. And free lots are filling up everywhere. In the West Seattle Junction, Bellevue Square, other suburban malls. At House of Hong last Saturday, in Seward Park last summer at a blogger picnic (Lordy, you should've seen the park that day, cars up on curbs all over).

Unless and until mass transit routes offer the convenience, speed and flexibility that cars do for multi-tasking, errand-running, kid-ferrying Americans (even factoring in traffic jams) there will always be a need for more parking in urban areas, and increasingly, in many suburbs.

The problem is not parking that is too easy, but too difficult. Because of limited space, parking will remain a scare resource, priced accordingly. In the future, underground and high-rise mechanized parking facilities may become even more necessary.

Just out of curiousity, I did a Google News search a few minutes ago for "parking problems" OR "parking shortage" OR "parking crunch." About 385 news stories from around the U.S., in the last 30 days, popped up, showing that the story run by the Seattle P-I today is a fantasy. Far from too much free parking, there's not enough free OR paid/metered parking, all across the land.

Some highlights, most of which echo situations in Seattle or elsewhere in Washington:

Merchants bemoan parking shortage downtown Jamaica, Queens, due partly to government vehicles hogging metered spaces;

Faced with a downtown parking shortage, Ocean City, Maryland is looking at raising parking fines and building more parking facilities;

Greenwich, Connecticut officials want to crack down harder on parking violators, going after meter-feeders and hiring collection agencies to make sure violators feel the pain of parking;

In Anchorage, parking is super-tight at a kids athletic complex and steamed parents are missing games they've come to watch;

In Albany, New York, state workers are gobbling up neighborhood parking spaces;

Business-savvy city officials in Minneapolis are having diners' cars towed after 10 p.m. on Saturday nights from metered spaces in the popular Warehouse District, as part of a parking crackdown;

Downtown Lake Worth, Florida is beginning to suffer a parking crunch and it's expected to worsen.

In the fantasy world of Seattle's Euro-centric enviros, for whom the P-I is required reading, less parking is a good thing because it will supposedly motivate people to use transit. No: better transit systems motivate people to use transit, and even then, not always.

Shoup says if all U.S. parking spaces were combined into a surface lot, it would be the size of Connecticut. Yeah, that sounds about right. And it'd be the best and highest use for my state of birth, as well.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at March 22, 2005 02:58 PM

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