They Hate You. They especially hate your car. They want you to be dependant on them.
I speak here of the Seattle City Council
To wean people from their cars, encourage new small businesses and add greenery, the Seattle City Council told businesses and developers Monday they no longer need to provide parking in some areas but must plant more shrubs.
The new rules, to take effect in January, could make parking tougher across the city.
“This looks to the future for a vision of a city that is less auto-dependent,” said Councilman Peter Steinbrueck.
Nevermind what the people want. It is now their vision versus your needs.
Some developers and business owners support the changes, which will not apply to residential neighborhoods, but some worry a Utopian vision could harm their livelihoods.
“It’s very business-unfriendly,” said Dan Wiseman, the second-generation owner of Wiseman Appliances in the Admiral area in West Seattle. His customers, he said, “are going to go to the big-box stores that have the parking.”
Because public transportation sucks. I seriously doubt that anyone on the Council has ever tried or had to ride a city bus with six-to-eight bags of groceries.
You know, kind of like what a single-mother would have to do if her neighborhood grocer has no parking.
———————
We move now from the Seattle City Council to the King County Council, where Larry Gossett, former Black Panther, has been elected Chairman.
This ought to be a grand couple of years.
“In order to force people to shop a big box stores with big parking lots, to destroy existing small businesses and force more people to become dependant on government largesse, and in order to imitate their heroes, the Knights Who Say Ni, and demand a Shrubbery…”
What Seattle needs now is a citizens initiative barring any city official or employee from having a reserved parking space. Exceptions made for emercency services on a generic basis, ie a spot for “police/sherriff vehicle” etc.
What they didn’t account for is lawsuits by the disabled. The number of handicapped parking spaces is done on a ratio of the number of spaces for the entire site. Reduced number of spaces means fewer handicapped spaces.
May the Law of Unintended Consequences slap them hard.
“It is now their vision versus your needs.”
Perfect discription of Planners and Planning Bureaus.
Also a perfect reason not to have any. If the Devil jumped up and swallowed them all tomorrow, no one would miss them at all, and somehow, the world would march on.
This underscores why my beloved bride and I escaped from the People’s Socialist Demokratik Metropolis of Seattle some thirty years ago.
We have made few purchases south of N. 145th St.(Seattle city limit) in that time. How many others buy their goods and services outside of Seattle as well?
In the words of the ol’ Norwegian Bachelor Farmer: “T’ell wid ’em. T’ell wid all of ’em.”