UW To Potentially Reduce On Campus Parking

The Laurelhurst Community Club, formerly the Laurelhurst Improvement Club, has been a long-standing neighborhood entity, serving the community since 1920.  

LCC maintains a website which states:

LCC was established to foster the improvement and beautification of the neighborhood. LCC seeks to identify and address community concerns and to provide a forum to promote solutions by working with the community at large, other civic organizations, and government.

 LCC publishes a hard copy newsletter ten times a year (2 issues are combined), called the "Laurelhurst Letter" which is mailed to about 2,800 households. Costs of the newsletter are off-set in part by neighbors opting to pay $60 annual dues as well as revenue from newsletter advertising.  

Here is a recent article::

Amendment to Reduce Campus Parking

Approval of the UW Campus Master Plan 2018 (CMP 2018) requires City Council review. The CMP 2018 was appealed to the Hearing Examiner (HE) in December 2017, and the recommendations from that process were sent to be reviewed again by members of City Council.  

Many of the recommendations of the HE were accepted by all parties, especially reducing single-occupancy trips to 12 percent over time, bicycle incentive improvements, constructing a continuous waterfront trail, and building 150 units of nearby moderate priced housing for staff.  

However, City Council members Johnson and O’Brien targeted a reduction on the cap for existing on-campus parking spaces. This had never before been addressed by the EIS, nor brought up in the Hearing Examiner comments, nor vetted by City-University Community Advisory Council (CUCAC). LCC is a CUCAC member.  

Neighborhoods that border the main campus could experience a sharp increase in local traffic and SOV parking, as already occurs on Mary Gates Memorial Drive, Surber Drive, and NE 41st St., as well as on residential streets behind UW student family housing –  “free” off-campus parking. This overspill of parked cars into neighborhood streets is exacerbated on “Special Event” days at the stadium, which draw 70,000+ attendees. 

Johnson and O’Brien’s amendment would reduce on-campus parking by implementing the following changes: 1) No minimum parking space requirements for new buildings 2) Reclassification of loading zones and resident parking (about 1,800 units) to include them in the total parking count (now 12,300) and 3) 3. Outright cut 3,300 campus parking places. 

These changes would result in a reduction of 5,100 parking units (58 percent), leaving only 7,200 discretionary parking units available for daily use, even with the projected 20 percent increase in students, faculty, and staff over the next 15 years. 

City Council’s arbitrary Johnson-O’Brien amendment calling for a decrease in parking was not tied to any metric for evaluation, or with accountability on the UW’s Transportation Master Plan (TMP) 12 percent reduction, or to alternative transportation modes. Impacts from such a reduction in parking capacity had not been studied prior to this out-of-the-blue City Council-proposed amendment. 

The University and its Board of Regents have another opportunity to review this recommendation over the next few months. LCC had expressed concerns about this reduction in parking capacity through its representation on CUCAC. The next steps will be negotiated between the University and the City Council.