With respect to the writer of the letter, “All parks should be free, for all,” use of that park is free. His emphasis is on the planned parking fees, but let’s think about that a bit more deeply. A look at the car lanes and parking at that park will convince you that about a third of the park area is pavement for vehicles. What if we eliminated all that, and increased the area of the free park by about 50 percent? Then there would be no fee for parking, because there would be no in-park parking, and there would be more real park area for everyone to enjoy.
If you want to take up valuable park space with your car (and perhaps a boat trailer), be willing to pay for the use of that space. Is a small parking fee really too much to ask? Your car is already costing you around 50 cents a mile to drive anyway, so if you drive to the park, it’s certainly not free. You can ride either an Everett Transit or a Community Transit bus to within very easy walking distance of the park, for a lot less than you can drive if you’re driving more than a couple miles. Sometimes, you can also park for free near Rosehill Community Center and take a free shuttle to and from the park. If you walk it instead, it’s only about five minutes.
It’s fine to say that the park, including parking, should be free for all, but as it is now, what does that elderly person do when he drives to the park and discovers that all the parking is taken? Now he’s wasted time and gas and still can’t enjoy the park. I live a little less than a mile from the park, and would not think of driving there at any time when the park might be busy, because it will take me about 15 minutes to walk, less time than to drive and then have to deal with finding parking in the crowded or full lot — and the walk does me good.
If you’re taking more things with you than you can reasonably carry, and you’re not going alone, you can drop your equipment off at the park with one of your passengers, go park your car up the hill, and enjoy the five minute walk down to the park. Of course, if everyone actually starts doing that, there’ll soon be a parking problem in old-town Mulikteo. My fondest hope to avoid that problem is that we’ll learn to use alternatives to cars, which in turn will lead to better public transportation, but that’s likely to remain a dream for the future.
Let’s keep a reasonable number of spaces reserved for free parking for those with legitimate disabled parking needs, and let the rest of us pay for the valuable park space we use with our cars — even those of us who are Mukilteo residents.
Tom Bruhns
Mukilteo
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