Seattle Accidentally Had To Forgive 200,000 Parking Tickets. It Should Have Privatized Parking Instead.
When the city moved its parking cops from the police department to the transportation department, it forgot to renew their ability to issue tickets.
Seattle's criminal justice reforms inspired by 2020's George Floyd protests succeeded in abolishing one aspect of policing, if only accidentally. A bungled transfer of parking enforcement from the police department to its transportation department is forcing the city to waive some $5 million in parking tickets.
The shift of the city's parking enforcement unit from the Seattle Police Department (SPD) to the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) got unanimous approval from the Seattle City Council in August 2021. It was part of the council's efforts to spin off more city functions out of SPD and into other departments.
But, as The Seattle Times reported last week, the transfer caused the city's parking enforcement personnel—who were never police officers—to lose the special commissions that empowered them to issue parking citations.
That oversight was corrected in April 2022, when Mayor Bruce Harrell ordered new commissions to be granted, reports the Times. But the city still had to forgive the 200,000 tickets issued during the prior seven months.
The slip-up, accidental and temporary though it was, is one of the more radical results of the city's policing reforms.
Following 2020's raucous protests and riots—where Seattle demonstrators forced the evacuation of one precinct building and established a self-governing, leftist street commune—the city council had considered far deeper cuts to the SPD budget.
Some council members endorsed activists' demands that the department's budget, then slightly over $400 million, be cut by 50 percent.
In the end, the city council cut SPD's budget by 11 percent on net. Spinning off functions from the police to nonpolice departments, including parking and 911 dispatchers, were responsible for a significant portion of those cuts.
The bureaucratic reshuffle of public safety and enforcement functions has gotten mixed reviews from criminal justice reformers at the time.
"Although these efforts to civilianize public safety and shrink the role of the police in our communities are a step in the right direction, it is not the same as what community has been calling for—police divestment and community reinvestment," wrote Mina Barahimi Martin, a policy analyst for the Washington American Civil Liberties Union, in a November 2021 blog post.
It advocated for shifting more money from public safety into housing, health care, and jobs programs.
One libertarian response to largely left-wing demands to defund the police in favor of other social spending was to instead privatize the provision of public safety. Nowhere would that be easier than parking.
Seattle, like many cities, provides a lot of on-street parking for free. Not charging for those spaces is troublesome from a free market perspective; taxpayers writ large are paying for parking spaces that a smaller subset of drivers use. The rent-free land provided is effectively a subsidy to those drivers.
And because prices aren't used to ration the space, people instead pay with their time by constantly circling the block looking for a place to park.
As a second-best solution to pricing free spaces, Seattle has a 72-hour rule that prohibits anyone from parking anywhere for more than 72 hours at a time. The rule is supposed to constantly redistribute space among drivers. But enforcing it obviously requires the employ of parking enforcement officers with the power to fine people for violating the rules.
Whether parking enforcement is conducted by the police department or the transportation department changes little about a system of government agents using fines to enforce a system of subsidies and forced rationing.
A better world is possible.
At a minimum, Seattle could expand its decade-old paid parking program—which charges a variable rate for parking spaces in higher-demand commercial areas—to the entire city.
Using prices to ration parking would shift the costs of parking from the public writ large onto individual drivers. It would also hopefully cut down on the need for city parking enforcement. Prices would encourage some people to park in off-street lots. Others could pay a market price for longer-term parking instead of gambling that they won't get a ticket for breaking the 72-hour rule.
The city's latest parking report for 2021 shows that even many priced parking areas have average occupancy rates well below the city's target rate of 70 percent to 85 percent.
That suggests parking is oversupplied and many existing public parking spaces could be sold off to adjacent property owners who could convert them into other uses or converted by the city instead into travel lanes for cars or bikes.
The former option would even earn the city money rather than costing it $5 million.
Indeed, the fact that property rights and prices can be assigned to parking spaces in the first place shows that parking isn't a public good that needs to be provided in public spaces by the government. Instead, it could all be privatized.
Without any public parking spaces, there would be no need for public parking enforcement. Private property owners would be responsible for charging for its use, controlling access, or converting it to nonparking uses.
That would do more to accomplish the goals of 2020's criminal justice reform protests than simply shifting parking cops from one department to another.
Rent Free is a weekly newsletter from Christian Britschgi on urbanism and the fight for less regulation, more housing, more property rights, and more freedom in America's cities.
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The slip-up, accidental and temporary though it was, is one of the more radical results of the city’s policing reforms.
No, it is not a “more radical” result, it is a more comical result, and a more serious administrative result.
This is the more radical result of the city’s policing reforms.
This is the more radical result of the State’s policing reforms.
“They were like, ‘Wait, you’re a health care worker? You were sent here alone? We don’t even go out alone. We always work in pairs. This is not OK,’ ” she said during a recent interview at her attorneys’ downtown Seattle law offices.
One of the officers told her, “I’m pretty sure there’s a law against that,” Dickson said.
*chokes on schadenfreude*
Dude, we don’t even let Scouts, of any age, go out alone.
My step mom, who has worked as a social worker predicted this result. It took her two seconds to identify the liability issues of sending an unarmed woman to deal with someone having a psychotic episode.
Never a fucken surprise. Instead of privatizing operations where competition and non political management can generate better returns. Oh hell no. Just sell the land monopoly to some crony who will get the rentier returns while the gummint still ends up on the hook for all the enforcement
This is one area I disagree with libertarians on… when there is an enforcement aspect to an operation, you DON’T want it privatized. I don’t want ABC corporation handing out violations when there’s a profit incentive to do so. *cough*private prisons*cough*
This is not to suggest that governments aren’t guilty of extreme enforcement when there’s a tax revenue carrot at the end of the stick… but why do we think this would be any better if Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey were in charge of parking tickets?
I’ve been caught in the bureaucratic nightmare of a privatized parking ticket. It’s a bad idea.
Good example of why it’s bad is a private towing company. Ever get towed when you weren’t at fault? I did, maybe 2003 or so, from an airport parking lot. It was a mistake, the city dismissed it, no fines, etc. I still was stuck with the towing bill and a week of “storage” while I was out of town, and they busted the window regulator when they jimmied the lock. The towing company wasn’t liable for any of that.
Towing is basically legalized vehicle theft, city sanctioned, and there is zero recourse. So endless incentive to abuse the position of power. Privatized profits, public liability, and no competition to incentivize better pricing or behavior.
Ditto.
My son was in an accident in my car. The police didn’t call until after the city-contracted towing firm had taken the car – which I could have driven home. My son had a minor concussion but the police were OK leaving him alone on a bench waiting for me to come get him.
It took two hours to find out where the car had been taken. By then they were closed. We went the next morning and learned that we owed both the towing fee and the storage fee for the first 24 hours. Since we’d already paid for 24 hours, we told them that we’d come back in the afternoon to get it.
They waited until we got back to tell us that they wouldn’t accept a credit card or check – only cash. Now we were two hours from another 24-hour charge. Thank God for ATMs.
Private towing = legalized theft.
GKP drops its latest on kids in NYC schools still under a mask mandate.
Covid is the least of your worries in NYC.
A govt employee screwed up in the public’s favor? Someone’s getting a written reprimand in their jacket. And it will stay there
for the rest of their careeruntil the union appeals and gets it rescinded.They gave me a ticket once for not paying for my parking. But I did, I just had it on my dashboard rather than on my driver’s side window.
It was a 100+ dollar ticket. I am still crazy pissed about it.
Well, yeah, Seattle city government is creating a gridlocked dystopia in one of the most beautiful, productive cities in the U.S. Privatizing parking enforcement might work; I am a Libertarian. And thanks for adding this most recent snafu to the public conversation.
Yet clearly the author does not know or live in Seattle, as we do. If one is going to propose solutions, one needs to actually know something about the situation.
The 72-hour rule is intended for vehicles in which there are unhoused occupants (and crime and trash, etc). This regulation is virtually never enforced, except for a few recent performance events by the new mayor.
There may be 2-4 hour “free” parking in residential parking zoned areas, for which we pay an annual fee for tags, but there is precious little metered parking in business areas in the larger downtown areas where we live, let alone free, unmetered parking. I do not believe the 70-85% metered parking occupancy rate. I observe closer to 99% during business hours as we struggle to find a space, though we usually walk. Maybe out in the suburban fringes of the city? We can barely drive to our own home, the zoned parking is so packed on both sides of narrow streets.
I wanted to bang my head against the wall when the author suggested even more bike lanes. Between virtually empty trolley showpieces and plans to shut down one of the few N-S bus lines, the 70, to build even more lightly used bike lanes in a city of crushing traffic jams (Mercer, SLU), more bike lanes are the very last, expensive thing we need.
These proposals are so far from the reality on the ground that I know the author just read data and thought it meant something. “That suggests parking is oversupplied and many existing public parking spaces could be sold off to adjacent property owners…” I do not know whether to laugh or weep.
I’m guessing they probably count midnight hours for how often metered parking is used. There is probably plenty of free spaces at 3 AM, when no one needs it.
They don’t appear to be counting 3 AM, but there’s certainly different demand at different times of day. If parking is at 50% at 8 AM and 100% at 2 PM you can’t simply say that averages out to 75% so you’re fine on spaces.
Also, I wonder about the places that were in excess of 120%. Does that represent people parking illegally? Did 1 in 6 people parked manage to find an illegal spot?
Yeah, results over 100% are hinky.
I can see your point of the author making the famous libertarian hand-wave over the details but the rest of your post revealed to me a person very unhappy with the conscious decision the voters of that region made to go green and discourage private vehicle convenience.
You may want to reconsider what you have been supporting.
You may want to reconsider what you have been supporting.
As a long-term resident of Seattle (moved here in the late 80s) I have voted in most elections, possibly missing a few small, not particularly noteworthy votes through the years, I can tell you the fact that you live here doesn’t automatically mean you support it.
Yes, it is true that many in Seattle have voted for– aggressively so– the very things that plague this city and are able to maintain a bizarre cognitive dissonance about the things happening around them vs what they’ve supported.
Rainbow crosswalks! YES!
America’s first openly gay pederast mayor! YES!
America’s first openly gay, white lesbian mayor! YES!
Defunded police! YES!
Harm reduction measures, not enforcement! YES!
YES! YES! YES! And more YES!
However, I strongly suspect they’re not commenting here and while I can’t speak for fabmonster, by the tone of xer message and on-point criticism of bike lanes, I’m going to guess that xe hasn’t voted for much, if any of it.
Speaking for myself… I did a quick memory assessment of everything I’ve voted on in the last 30 some years and I honestly don’t think that a single thing I’ve ever voted on went my way, with the exception of maybe one (1) issue. At least for city level stuff. There’s never been a candidate I voted for that won. There’s never been a bond measure I’ve voted against that lost, there’s never been anything I said “no” on that didn’t end up “yes” and in the vanishingly rare occasion I voted “yes” the answer was a resounding “no” although I admit I can’t remember a whole lot I vote “yes” on in this town.
If you wanted a pretty darned good predictor of how an election, ballot measure, bond issue or candidate will do in an election, my ballot would be an almost statistically perfect bellwether. Just read my ballot and assume the polar opposite of everything I voted for or (in 99.999% of cases) against.
I don’t get offended when people who don’t know me say, “You voted for it” because it’s actually a perfectly understandable conclusion. Someone is voting for it, so if I live here, there’s a greater than 50% chance that it was me– if one doesn’t know me.
But alas, things have gotten so bad that my primary goal has become to leave. Which means that the population will be further purified towards the people who support this nonsense, meaning that Seattle will just get more of what it’s collectively wanted, and harder.
Q: How do you get a crunchy, liberal progressive Seattle Times Columnist to sound like Tucker Carlson?
A: Give him everything he votes for.
Longer Answer: Give him everything he votes for on a silver platter, give him extra helpings, and make sure he takes home the leftovers.
It’s been 20 years since I lived in Seattle (4th and Wall, specifically), but I’ve visited the city multiple times over the years since then, and I can’t remember seeing any free parking except in the residential areas (Ballard, Freemont, etc) and even there street parking is metered in the commercial areas of those parts of town. I can’t imagine the homeowners who pay property taxes in residential areas would stand for having to also pay metered rates for parking on the streets in front of single family homes and I wouldn’t put it past the city to already have some kind of permit parking on a lot of the streets with concentrations of apartment buildings around UW.
The gridlock I remember is largely created by the city planners; I’ll probably never forget heading down along the west side of lake Union (I think it was 7th or 8th Ave?) and seeing the traffic lights changing in exact sync for 6-7 blocks ahead with no two consecutive lights ever being green at the same time. On the freeways, I always put it on the local drivers (possibly the worst in the english-speaking world, at least in 2001-2003). Any group larger than 7 vehicles would somehow manage to create a rolling obstruction to traffic on a 3-4 lane freeway; people seemed to love driving in precise formation (maybe trying to linger in each other’s “blind spots” thereby preventing any potential lane change by a nearby vehicle?) so as to create a mobile blockage travelling at 10-15 mph under the posted limit and allowed at most 1 or 2 other cars to sneak by each minute.
I wonder what happened to the people who paid their parking fines before the tickets were declared invalid. Did they get refunds?
No need to bother with this one –
No one will be able to afford to drive a car after a couple more weeks of Biden and the democrats war on gasoline.
They can assign a parking space and a tent to each homeless person and end homelessness in Seattle in one day.
(gonna be a bitch come December, but what the hell)
Of course, if you’ve already paid your ticket do not be expecting a refund or you’re gonna be disappointed.