Whether parking to service public transit is free or expensive doesn’t matter to the locals (“With commuter lots clogged, Sound Transit plans parking fees,” The Herald, April 30). What matters is the impact on our neighborhoods.
Who can explain Sound Transit simply ignoring the Growth Management Act, which requires mitigation of obvious impacts on infrastructure of any significant project, let alone the largest regional project ever. Just because Sound Transit is an “inevitable” public project doesn’t absolve it of mitigating the impacts on local infrastructure. If a large private development had equal impacts near I-5 in Mountlake Terrace, the developer couldn’t simply assume the impacts on the local infrastructure to be self-canceling.
Hoping local buses will compensate or hoping that more folks will walk or ride their bikes is not a plan; it is bureaucratic impunity applied ineptly. The few must sacrifice their quality of life for the supposed greater good of the many. The aphorism says all politics is local. We must not have a local government since no one locally is doing anything to allay the impacts of transit parking and traffic on the locals?
The impacts on Mountlake Terrace of inadequate parking and of inadequate provision for surface street throughput will be forever felt in the residential neighborhoods surrounding our downtown. These are actual people, not abstractions. Those whose quality of life is at stake deserve more than debating society sideshows followed by even more excuses for the inevitable.
Leonard French
Mountlake Terrace
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