Sounds Like They’re Thinking About Making Some Changes

1. Longer vending hours are a great idea, especially in the summer. Free parking is a mistake. Unless they have a whole lot of capacity sitting empty, which I doubt, they'll increase the demand for parking, leaving more cars circling for spots.

3. Republicans are anti-tribe? You'd think they'd consider them like any other corporation and try to get them subsidies.

So the GOP is against Natives now?

@1 Closing the cobblestone street is a big mistake. The PDA needs to be checked hard, since they don't listen nearly enough to the residents and vendors. The fiasco over the new elevator is a prime example.

Stories to be reported on abound there, according to numerous grapevines…

Congrats to Mike McGinn, it has been one full year since he gave up being a registered lobbyist.

They should completely redesign the Pike Place Market and plow down the whole claptrap to build a modern, 21st century, mall-marketplace…and e-Bay for independent bead and honey sellers.

Build gigantic parking lots and garages…plow down old unused buildings and achieve low density. Then split route 99 and have both the north and south ends terminate in parking garages.

Get a bunch of cool stores like walmart and forever xxi to come to town and start serving the 99 percent, instead of the 1 percent…

Free parking is a mistake? Are you from Mars? I don't shop where I can't park for free, period, and hundreds of thousands of people in this area feel the same way about it.

In case you didn't have a clue, the Market is on the National Register of Historic Places AND it's a Federal Historic District. You can no more 'tear it down' than you can Mount Rushmore legally. But please, keep trying to troll in the odd parody of Bailo that you have going.

Re #1 – I would love to see the cobblestoned portion of Pine Street closed to vehicles all the time when the market is open. Vehicles struggle to get through as it is and it would be better for pedestrians to have a safer and larger space.

I think he meant that free parking without the closure of Pike Place to non-tenant cars would be a mistake?

We know you only shop in sprawlsville, [ivan]. Where, exactly, do you park for free in downtown Seattle?

Like most things, it's simple supply and demand. You have a limited supply (parking spaces in a garage), and at a price point of “free” a nearly unlimited supply. There are people therefore that want to park – would pay to park – but can't park. There are also people that would have found another way into the city, but drove because parking was “free”. The market makes less money (because they're giving away spots they could have charged for), people waste time circling, and more people drive.

Whoooosh!

I love how he keeps trying to sound like Seattle is Detroit or New Orleans at Katrina +5 days. It's so cute!

Actually, I park for free at the Pike Place Market, the two or three times a year I go there. Otherwise there's nothing downtown for me that the neighborhoods don't deliver. If you want to call West Seattle, White Center, Northgate, and Greenwood “Sprawlsville,” be my guest.

Most of my Seattle shopping is at Costco and McLendon's. Downtown Seattle, by and large, isn't worth my time, except to get through en route to somewhere else.

The “other” Seattle doesn't count, Ivan. What, are you new here?

The downtown thought bubble has spoken.

Can the families that live in the other Seattle afford downtown anymore, in any way?

Where do you park for free at Pike Place Market?

???? I don't get this common attitude. How does free parking help the neighborhoods? Do you think you'll be one of the lucky ones that actually finds a spot, or will you be in the line circling with everyone else?

I live in a neighborhood, and I'll tell you my trick to avoid the whole mess: I take the bus.

Re: #3: More proof that AWB is nothing but a front group for right-wing, free-market radicals. Their staff is nothing but a bunch of ideologues and George W. Bush sycophants who have no interest in the kind of pragmatic approach that would actually advance their member interests on labor, environmental and tribal issues in Olympia. They're pretty much Washington state's answer to the Club for Growth.

WTF? Right on Pike Place, or in the truck load zones. Truck plates, bitches!

You really want to kill the Market, don't you? Ever hear of deliveries? Pedestrians have a sidewalk. Cars don't drive on the sidewalk.

In other similar places the streets are open from say 6-8am and then from 7-9 pm. Or even open all night.

Why just on the weekends? It should be a pedestrian street everyday with hours in the morning and evening for deliveries. Right now it mostly just serves to trap people who don't know better then to try driving down it.

I remember one Fat Tuesday, 30-ish years ago, seeing a couple having sex on the sidewalk, middle of a sunny day, but you are right that there aren't people driving on the sidewalk.

They have sidewalks.

The Market can't be killed at this point, it is a hotel industry tourist attraction.
Whatever the hoteliers want is likely to happen.

There are deliveries all day, every day. Close Pike Place to vehicles and you kill the Market. It's that simple.

Ivan – giffy nails it in his comment below. Deliveries can occur in the early am and then the street can be closed. As it stand now, the street is used as a large sidewalk with people moving between the shops on both sides. It would make it less confusing and painful for the drivers who attempt to drive through that section and are caught in the mass of pedestrians.

An actual tourist trap.

They should close the street and open more shops in place.

Mike Hewitt is a Republican.

Plenty of markets manage to function without all day deliveries. Hell most malls and stores manage it just fine. Then there are street fairs, farmers markets, swap meets, etc.

Deliveries occur when vendors need them, not at a time of YOUR choosing. Try to get past your irrational hatred of automobiles, will you? Pike Place is a STREET, where jaywalking laws are not enforced. I have been driving it for 44 years now — admittedly less and less now. Patient drivers are rewarded with free parking there.

So you're not parking, you're loading.

How they handle this in most pedestrian-only areas is only allow trucks for deliveries. In downtown Ljubljana I even noticed a automatic bollards with a numeric keypad to make sure only authorized trucks can come through.

Except the aggressive panhandling ordinance.

I'll guess that officers on foot patrols will enforce existing laws liberally. The ordinance was an attention-getter, that's for sure.

Sounds like they’re thinking about making some changes, including: Longer vendor hours (closing at 7:00 pm instead of 5:30), offering free parking for two hours for people who spend more than $10 at the market; adding a store featuring all kinds of Northwest food; offering ready-to-eat chef-prepared meals; and closing the cobblestoned portion of Pine Street to vehicles on the weekend.

i.e. stuff they should have been doing ten years ago

Since when is Mr. Anti-Car concerned about the locals' ability to utilize their vehicles on a given street?

Matt the Engineer says:

“So you're not parking, you're loading.”
–
Tell me, Mr. Engineer, how do I load without first parking?

1. I guess it depends on how much business the vendors are doing. if they're already doing well, I agree there's no need to offer the free-parking incentive. If they're struggling, the added business that would come in from accomodating motorists with subsidized parking could more than make up the difference. And there's parking all over Downtown, though probably hard to find in the prime nearby locations… not as much as you move outward.

3. Tribes get subsidies from the government and Republicans, as you may recall, are anti-subsidy unless it involves a particular interest of theirs.

I'm not anti-car, I'm common sense for a region that has extremely limited geographical realities. My concern here however is for the farmers and retailers at Pike Place Market, without whom we'd have no Pike Place Market.

He's not loading, he's freeloading!

I don't think it hinges on how well the venders are doing as much as how well the parking is doing. I assume they're only talking about the Pike Place Market lot behind the market. I also believe that this lot regularly fills up with people going to Pike Place Market (and admittedly other places). Therefore the “free” parking wouldn't increase business (much) but would lose hundreds/thousands of cars worth of parking fees per day, at dozens of dollars each.

“No Parking / Loading Only Zone” Clearly you're expected to load without parking. I'm sure Seattle codes clearly differentiate between the two.

Seems the list of sponsors for teh Senate Republican fundraiser are very similar to those supporting the Roadkill Caucus and Senator Hobbs…

My guess is that the market is looking at these changes to help vendors–esp food vendors–that don't always benefit from tourists. Closing the street on weekends would create more space, making it possible for people who are actually grocery shopping to do so. The butchers, fruit vendors etc could more than just cute stands for tourists to gawk and by the occasional bag of cherries from.

I live in the market, and rarely shop there for food, which sucks. But the hours are hard for someone who has a job and can't dash out at 4;30 just to shop locally. And then on weekends one needs armor to make it through the throngs.

I think 'A local access only' solution would be perfect for the street. I have to drive through to get to my garage, and deliveries have to be made, but lines of cars searching for parking don't help anyone.

No they don't. Most businesses get deliveries at certain times. That's why you see a lot of trucks at the grocery store in the early morning and not at say 5:30pm. It is not that hard for a business to plan ahead one whole day in terms of product needs.

And really it is far easier to park a bit further away and walk or just pay a few bucks then deal with that clusterfuck of a street.

I also don't think “Thebankruptcy” is for real. Posts like these are laughable. And he never returns to defend his comments after their flaws are pointed out. As if a giant Wal-Mart is going to draw tourists by the boatload to Seattle. Is there even a Wal-Mart in Seattle?

The problem is that virtually none of the Market vendors and retailers have on-site storage–and indeed, the farmer/produce types especially. A lot of those places have fresh stock dropped off quickly through the day to keep full tables for customers and tourists. Close off all-day deliveries and the Market vendors will lose money.

Since everyone seems to be bringing their own politics, perhaps Josh and Erica should contact actually Market vendors for their opinions on the street closing idea? Don't ask the PDA, ask the actual Market people who work there. Ask the day stall people, the produce people, the shops downstairs, the restaurants upstairs, and the businesses down toward the park and up and down Post Alley.

Seems like you could work around that though. Maybe some storage could be set up near by, or you could have a very limited permit based system to let in the occasional delivery. Or hire a couple people with wagons to haul it in from the back side of the market. It'd be old timey.

Who pays for all that?

I don't see what would cost that much. There is probably some vacant space in the market right now, and a permitting system could be handled by the same people that permit commercial vehicles now.

I was mostly joking about the wagons.

Lots of markets around the world work just fine without an open street right next to them. Its not like this is some crazy idea that has never been tried before.

If your lowest common demonimator is “I MUST PARK FOR FREE” in determing where you shop, then I'm not surprised downtown has nothing to offer you.

I love downtown and other neighborhoods, including my own (West Seattle).

I dont get this attitude either. I live in West Seattle and I love it for all that it is, but there's a lot that downtown has to offer. I don't get the downtown hate, just because you can't park for free. If that's such a huge issue for you, take the bus. If not, park in one of the many paid parking areas, some of which do validation.

He sounds like John Bailo, only taken to an extreme caricature… and that's saying a lot knowing how John thinks.

Sure, if PPM is getting all the money for those parking fees under the status quo. But I'm not sure if that's how it works or not, if they own the lots in question or if another vendor does. If someone else gains from those fees, they're still going to get them… it's just that PPM will pay the lot owners for those subsidized fees.

Why do you care? You've already admitted that you don't go there and the only times you do, you're freeloading with your truck plates… oh wait, that's it.

Produce shippers generally deliver very early in the AM, so I think your vendors are going to be okay.

So make it a 'commercial/delivery vehicles only' road. Problem solved!

LOL! And you should do stand up.

Completely agreed. I've always thought they should close that street to cars during the prime market hours, it'd make the whole market experience so much better for everyone involved.

Besides, I never understood why anyone would want to drive on it anyway – 30 minutes to get a block, wtf?

Yeah, why don't you go ask the vendors at the market what they think of closing the road (they speak out against it every single time it comes up) and let us know what they're saying since the last time someone mentioned it like 7 or 8 months ago either here or on Stranger.

Trust me, there is no free storage down at the Market. Every last square inch of the actual Market has long been used up in the 100+ years of it's existence. Unless you were able to fund converting one of the parking lots behind it on Western, there's nothing. A few stores pay for some tiny storage spaces, but they're all taken the last I heard and are mucho denero.

“fight the powerful liberal, labor, environmental and tribal interests in Olympia.”

Yes. Screw employees, screw the environment, and screw the victims of the American Holocaust. They shouldn't have any power at all, let alone be powerful.

Last time I checked, truck plates weren't free. Besides, they're — wait for it — on a truck!

You're being obtuse. For the time I'm there (the 30-minute limit), it's parking.

Yes! Rage against the strawmen!

Back to reality: Both Democrats and Republicans protect powerful special interests. These Democratic interest groups you've mentioned are far from being powerless, just as the GOP's interests remain potent as well. Sometimes an interest groups advocacy actually would benefit the general public welfare, but not in many other cases. Don't give interest groups on either side a pass. We should scrutinize all advocacy.

Mmmhmm.

I can't possibly be the only one who gets sarcasm…
C'mon.
And this was a give-a-way.

(unless the other commenters are doing an even better job…)

The only one besides Matches, that is.

There was some hand puppet I've seen that did this “Whoooosh!” thing, as in “right over your head”.

A YouTube link would be appreciated.

Note to self, it's not just the goddamn parking.
It's not the people that knowingly buy homes without yards with the expectation that the rest of the city will feel sorry for them and buy them a park.
It's not the overlapping multimodal transportation infrastructure proposals that are always in the same places, followed by asking everybody for money, followed by bitching about transit/sidewalk/car trapped neighborhoods not lining up to absorb every density upzone idillic spewed on bubble bound blogs like this.
No, it's not any of that, I just get tired of the hands out from companies like Vilcan disguised as “advocates”, when all they are are real estate whores.

[baker] You really belong in the suburbs. You live in a city – get used it.

Try telling UPS, FexEx, the USPS, and all those guys they can only deliver to 150 or so business BEFORE 7am.

So if hundreds of thousands of people were to jump off a cliff, would you, too? Sheesh. I am willing to pay my share for parking, which is never free.

Supermarket deliveries are from specific vendors in the local area early in the morning–the dairy farm; produce vendors. Large grocery deliveries–trust me, I've worked at grocery stores from high school through college–come when they come and the big semi pulls up out back to unload. Supermarkets also have tons of storage; the Market stores and vendors emphatically do not and cannot.

If they have to get a stock resupplied, they get the stock resupplied during the day. The only way to load up all the vendors and businesses on what, six combined floors of business? would be to load from either Western Avenue or 1st Avenue. Let's pick a business just on the first lower level–where the pipe shop is, or the barber shop, or the magic shop.

1st avenue delivery in the summertime: UPS or whoever has to BLOCK 1st Avenue–good luck with that, first off. Next, the delivery person has to move all his freight through Pike Place, the massive crowd, to the ONE tiny elevator that was created via the Proposition 1 cluster (that's an expose waiting to be written in and of itself), wait for it to open/clear up, and then navigate all the way back out. Meanwhile, 1st Avenue–which has buses in the right lane where Mr. UPS is parked–is now backed up all the way to the Space Needle.

Western Avenue delivery in the summertime: UPS guy has to reverse navigate everything I just wrote to get all the way up to, let's say, 1st Avenue. Via one tiny elevator. Meanwhile, the rows of delivery trucks have now backed up Western Avenue and discouraged people from parking to go shopping in the Market. Also, good luck persuading all those vendors to buy into the system when deliveries will take orders of magnitude longer.

I'll even one-up what I just wrote. How the hell would any delivery from Western or 1st reasonably reach the Athenian or Lowell's during the day in the summer? Ram hand carts over the dead bodies of hundreds of tourists?

Joe Szilagyi is an embittered curmudgeon who spends his life hating on Jbailo because his mom didn't give him a last name with as much vowels per consonants as john.

“Limited” being the operative word.

The Great Wall of China, is a monument.

The Parthenon is a monument.

Pike Place Market is a bunch of wooden stalls on a mudhill that someone threw together back in the 1900s.

The place might be “historic” but the construction is horrible and should be redone. I'm all for history, but for example, to be historically accurate you would probably inject half the merchants there with smallpox and make sure none of them lived past the average life expectancy of 49.

Seriously — built a mall with escalators so people can get up and down to the waterfront…a waterfront with a surface street boulevard.

Well, of course like any vendor they're going to complain about any change that's going to force them to change their schedules. I've worked with enough manufacturers and retail vendors to assert that without fail any systemic change that requires an adjustment on their part is going to result in serious moaning and complaining, because no one ever likes having to change their routines, whether personal or work related. It takes you out of your comfort zones.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's actually going to hurt their business. You have to take a wider view than just going to a source that's clearly going to hate such change.

Wow, a laughably fallacious statement rebutted by another laughably fallacious statement! I love political discourse!

The last thing the merchants at the Market need is the PDA screwing with them still more in the present economic environment. There's no public outcry to close the road, so there's no need to.

How is asking them to take deliveries during off-peak hours “screwing” them? By that definition we all get screwed on a frequent basis.

That said, if you read down the thread I offer a better suggestion: Make the road a commercial/delivery exclusive roadway, closing it to all other traffic. This would eliminate that issue and allow the vendors to take deliveries anytime, while leaving the roadway otherwise open for pedestrians entering and exiting the market.

That's a reasonable suggestion, but if that happens it should ONLY happen during the summer season. When the market depopulates of tourists and the epic crowds come end of September and it's just locals again Pike Place would need to open for locals and regional customers to be able to just drive up again.