[trome]

The terribly restrictive zoning hasn't helped, if we got rid of the height caps and parking minimums that kneecap growth, we would see many more apartments and condos being built. Why should a 1 bedroom apartment be over a grand in Ballard or Fremont?

[shados]

Not sure removing parking minimums is all that great an idea if the public transit isn't keeping up though.

I'm also not very familiar with Seattle, but generally when cities just start building nilly willy, traffic become a real problem, which then limits how far from city center you can be while still having an acceptable commute, which drastically raises prices since people are not willing to live further out.

[trome]

Parking minimums service a minority of the population of Seattle, while adding 15% to 20% onto the average rental price. Another angle is the road network in Belltown is well beyond capacity, and is likely to only have safety and pedestrian/biker friendliness improvements done moving forward (if not a road diet or car ban), so how do you intend to service these empty spaces so they can be usable?

There isn't more land to build roads on, and tunneling for roadways is extremely expensive and prone to delays (eg. SR 99 tunnel), esp. compared to our rail tunnels which have been repeatedly completed ahead of schedule and under budget.

[shados]

I admittedly only have been in Seattle once, but it didn't feel very friendly for people without cars (I don't drive myself, and it was a pain). It's better than average, but average is not a very high bar.

Is it really a minority of people who have cars there? Even in NYC, while a lot of people don't have cars, I'm not sure it's the minority.

Regardless of all that, if you build up without car infrastructure, you need to up public transportation to keep up. If you do then there's no problem. Is that happening in Seattle? In Boston/Cambridge people are also asking for parking minimums to be done with, but the public transportation infrastructure is getting worse and worse, so you have areas like around Cambridge's Alewife that are becoming massive traffic bottlenecks as they're building up around it. That's just not scalable.

[chrismcb]

In 2014 an Oregon live article claimed 17 percent of Seattlites didn't have a car. So no car owners are not the minority, despite what the op wants you to believe. Yes in the three years since that article had been published in sure more people have given up cars, but they are still in the minority. Given how poor public transportation is it will be a while yet before car owners are in the minority

[baumandm]

On the other hand, bus transit service gets cut if the passenger numbers aren't there to support it. Better to drive more people to transit and let Metro/Sound Transit catch up, rather than wait for them to improve service just in case.