Description

Parking at the new Tukwila library is not a 'challenge': it's an impossibility.

It appears people working in the SHAG buildings, visitors to them, or residents who have not paid high fees for a parking stall, all end up filling the library's parking lot.

This is an impossible situation for library patrons, who have every right and need to be able to visit the library by car, and stay there are reasonable length of time: a few minutes, or a couple of hours. They cannot do so now.

The ordinary workweek day sees a completely full parking lot, and yet if you go into the library, you will find very few patrons there. The problem is parking by people who are not library patrons, yet that parking lot, small though it is, was intended for library patrons only.

The most immediate and expedient cure would be to designate the lot as “Parking for Lbrary Patrons Only – All Others Will Be Towed”. (Perhaps some of the spaces could be shared somewhat: “Parking For Library Patrons Or Community Center Visitors Only...”. A time limit of, say, 2 hours, added to such notices, would help. It would also help if a couple of spaces were marked “10-minute Parking For Pickup/Check Out of Materials Only”, similar to designated spaces near restaurants for picking up of takeout orders only.

Street parking is next to irrelevant in this case. There are next-to-no spaces available on that short stretch of South 1/44th.

No one connected to the SHAG buildings should be permitted to use these spaces, at all. Nor should construction crew members working on the next SHAG building projects.

The situation could be ameliorated, if not solved, by having some reasonable amount of overflow parking available, at some reasonably close additional parking lot. But whatever solutions need to be made – temporary or permanent – the current situation is – with no exaggeration – impossible.