{"id":710,"date":"2025-11-30T22:29:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T22:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/?p=710"},"modified":"2025-11-30T22:33:48","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T22:33:48","slug":"bellevue-will-feel-like-a-big-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/?p=710","title":{"rendered":"Bellevue will feel like a big city"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The Council meeting on Tuesday night will feature a study session on\u00a0the<a href=\"https:\/\/bellevue.legistar.com\/View.ashx?M=F&amp;ID=14992336&amp;GUID=6459978E-30BE-45C8-9CB3-2A0DF83AE5AA\"> <strong>Curb Pricing Study<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0recommendations: 10am-8pm in Old Bellevue, Downtown, Wilburton, Spring District, and BelRed (see map on page 48 for actual boundaries; Old Bellevue includes all of Wildwood Dog Park and BelRed is smaller than you&#8217;d expect). This proposal does not cover payment for loading zone use, though that&#8217;s been talked about in the\u00a0past.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The new curb pricing plans will completely reshape the city&#8217;s experience with parking. If you&nbsp;have your car out overnight, you&#8217;ll now be able to leave it until 1pm, though you&#8217;ll have to pay the meter starting at 10am. Free parking won&#8217;t start until 8pm, since the peak times are lunch and dinner.&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is expected to break even on the $1.6M cost within a year, and $2.3M in annual net revenue thereafter (page 35) can pay for curb enhancements for pedestrians, wayfinding, and ADA on-street parking spots. It should also pay for enhanced enforcement, including occasional enforcement in adjacent RPZs. This is only the city&#8217;s portion of the cost, however; as people start trying to find free parking in library, park, mall, and small business lots, adjustments will be needed for enforcement there or to add parking gates.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Page 27 says time limits would be enforced at parks in the downtown area (but there\u2019s no mention of walk-offs).&nbsp;Page 36 does not include these in areas where&nbsp;there would be an hourly parking cost. I am not sure if current park parking utilization rates&nbsp;and park users vs. walk offs were evaluated in the study<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>When the data was collected to determine the need for curb pricing, around 25% of cars in 2 hr zones were observed to be staying over 3 hours (page 5 of 158). This means that the target occupancy might be reachable with enforcement only, but it is expensive and cannot break even when tickets are only $54.&nbsp;Tickets might need to triple to break even (page 28), and it\u2019s unclear whether these are set by King County and\/or will be the same after curb pricing is implemented.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This curb pricing outreach effort was extremely thorough and might be a good example for other city policy changes to follow. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What do you think of this plan? You can email City Council now or come to the meeting this week and speak in the public comment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Tuesday, December 2nd<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>City Council, 6pm (<a href=\"https:\/\/bellevue.legistar.com\/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1273117&amp;GUID=5FFC0F84-951C-4C4A-87C4-33CBBDC303B4&amp;Options=info%7C&amp;Search=\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">link<\/a>)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>There will be 30 minutes for public comment; speaker sign-up starts at noon (<a href=\"https:\/\/bellevuewa.gov\/council-oral-comms\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">link<\/a>)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you&#8217;d like to find out about agenda items like this a little earlier, please consider signing up for the newsletter using the link in the upper right. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Council meeting on Tuesday night will feature a study session on\u00a0the Curb Pricing Study\u00a0recommendations: 10am-8pm in Old Bellevue, Downtown, Wilburton, Spring District, and BelRed (see map on page 48 for actual boundaries; Old Bellevue includes all of Wildwood Dog Park and BelRed is smaller than you&#8217;d expect). This proposal does not cover payment for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=710"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":715,"href":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710\/revisions\/715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newbellevue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}