“I think Seattle’s transportation is good and bad. I think it’s good when it comes to the metro system, especially for people that work downtown. When it comes to driving downtown, I hate it. I think it’s very bad because there’s always so much traffic, and there’s never anywhere to park. Although a pro is on Sundays, parking is free, there’s always still so much construction going on that it makes it really hard to find parking. If I can, I try to avoid driving through downtown.”
“I think the traffic isn’t too bad. Personally, I can get through Seattle pretty easily, and I don’t think it is too difficult. But parking, I do think the parking flow is difficult because there’s not a lot of parking space around, which necessarily isn’t a problem.”
“I think the traffic is kind of a hassle, just because, like me, as a student, I commute to school, and parking is a really big struggle. So, actually, I prefer to get dropped off at school just to avoid the whole thing.”
“Someone in the government system once mentioned that most of the parking situations and most of the traffic were being done just to prevent people from using their own local vehicles and to encourage the use of public transportation. To an extent, I think it’s really great because, at the end of the day, it is environmentally better if we use our cars less and use public transportation more.But the amount of public transportation there is, and its availability and affordability, is not really reasonable, especially as a student who doesn’t have anything. I do see the pros, but there are also a lot of problems with it at the same time.”
“I’m not originally from the Seattle area, so moving from the Caribbean—and I lived in eastern Washington at one point as well—you see a drastic change in terms of people’s understanding of controlling their vehicles, using their blinkers, and properly responding to and adhering to the normal laws of driving. So that tends to add a lot to the traffic build-up, and then how people navigate through just the roads in Seattle.In terms of parking specifically, the one big change that you see here is there’s a lot more lots that are ticketed and require you to pay. So, I think that’s a play on the amount of people that are in Seattle. It’s a super dense location, so you have to monitor where people can park and how often they can park there in order to keep a good flow of society.Making that transition for new residents from wherever they may come from to here a little bit easier in terms of finding good parking locations—especially downtown—and also navigating through traffic is something that I think could be improved.”
“I don’t really have a lot of experience in terms of driving out here, but one thing I will note is that I’m from the Vancouver, Portland area, and with it being a metropolitan area, too, compared to here, the traffic is a lot more congested. There are a lot of people being ticketed for their parking, I noticed.I take a lot of public transportation, and I notice a lot of professionals are using public transportation versus using a car, maybe because they’re trying to avoid the traffic, or maybe they’re trying to avoid all the ticketing fees. So that’s one thing I definitely noticed. And so, I think the city can do a better job by maybe making parking tickets less.”
Source: Seattle Medium
