The Seattle NIMBY Nightmare: A Five-Minute Walk From House to Car

The nightmare outcome KING 5 envisions—"Imagine having to walk a quarter mile from your car to your home after work"—works out to about a five-minute walk from car to porch. Is that tiny inconvenience—a shorter walk than many transit riders somehow manage to undertake daily—really a sufficient reason to demand that developers add hundreds of new parking spaces, thereby driving up rents and forcing lower-income renters further out into the suburbs (where they'll definitely need to own a car)?

Talk about social engineering.

And, more to the point: Even assuming the story's absurd premise—everyone who moves into a new apartment building in a dense urban village will own a car—the fact is that no one, including [angry West Seattle resident Gary] Reifel, other homeowners, or even those theoretical multi-car-owning renters, actually owns the streets. You have no more right to park in the space in front of your house than you have to your favorite park bench, or the prettiest view, or the nicest spot on the beach. Public amenities like parking are just that: Public—not private facilities to be enjoyed only by those who happened to get there first.