Balk: 20% of Seattle households are car-free, and we have barely added cars to our city since 2017

Gene Balk, the excellent data journalist over at the Seattle Times, wrote more this week about the car ownership ceiling Seattle seems to have hit back in 2017. From 2010 to 2017, Seattle's population boomed as did the number of cars registered in the city. After 2017, the population continued growing, but the number of cars has stayed essentially unchanged.

From 2010 to 2017, Seattle's population grew by an estimated 118,990 people, and the number of cars registered in the city grew by 72,150. That means for every ten new residents, the city added six new cars. But from 2017 to 2023, the city added 25,500 new people but only 2,500 cars, a rate of just one new car for every ten new residents. As a result, the share of households without a car is now higher than 20% for the first time in modern memory.

There are a lot of factors contributing here: New apartment buildings opening in areas with quality transit and job access, expansion of light rail, expansion of the bike network, traffic being terrible and unsolvable, and the cost of living increasing. Balk hypothesizes that its this last one that is doing a lot of the heavy lifting:

I suspect the ever-increasing cost of living here is the primary catalyst behind the growing number of city residents living without a car. After all, transportation costs are the second-largest household expense after housing in the U.S., and that's primarily because of car ownership. Beyond the cost of the vehicle itself, there's fuel, maintenance and repairs, insurance, parking, registration fees and so on. It makes sense that a growing number of city residents would want to avoid all these expenses."

I also would not discount the impact of bad traffic, which can increase the share of car-free households in two ways: New residents choosing from the beginning to not bring a car and existing residents choosing that they don't need their old car anymore and getting rid of it. My spouse and I arrived in Seattle with a car, but it quickly became clear that it mostly just sat on the street while we paid every month for insurance. We found that walking, biking and taking transit was much more enjoyable, so we sold that car and haven't considered replacing it since.

Screenshot from the Inrix ParkMe map showing real-time parking availability in lots and garages. This is just a sampling. If you zoom in it will show even more of them.

The plateau in car ownership roughly coincides with Seattle's biggest employment center reaching its practical car maximum some time in the 2010s. The restriction is not parking, it's the roads and the fact that a huge percentage of workers are trying to arrive and leave at the same time. As Amazon and other employers built out South Lake Union and parts of downtown, Belltown and Lower Queen Anne, they nearly always included huge parking garages as part of their developments. Now there are empty parking spots in garages all over downtown and South Lake Union because the roads can't move enough vehicles to fill them all within the timeframe people are arriving or leaving for work. The Inrix ParkMe website shows real-time parking availability, and at 11:30 a.m. on a Wednesday (when they should be at maximum use) there are dozens of parking garages sitting 60-70% empty just within South Lake Union, Belltown and downtown. Many of them have more than 100 unused parking spaces. There are only so many cars that can move in and out of all the city's freeway and roadway access points during the rush hour windows. For a while, people responded by extending rush hour (staggering their shifts an hour earlier or later as many workplaces allow). I remember this being a talking point during the 2010s. But you can only stagger a shift so early or late. At a certain point, all of the supposed time and convenience benefits of driving a car vanish, and people make the logical choice to walk, bike or take transit instead.

There's also no compelling future in committing to a car in Seattle. Everybody knows that traffic will not be better in the future than it is today, so it's unappealing to buy a vehicle that is guaranteed to spend most its functional life crawling in traffic. I can think of many better ways to spend $12,000 a year. There is no way for Seattle to add significantly more road capacity, at least there's no way to do it safely and responsibly. The only ways to increase vehicle throughput directly decrease the safety and comfort of all other road users, which makes streets less inviting and hurts our health and economic prosperity as a city.

The only viable option forward is to commit to modes that are more space efficient and therefore have the capacity for growth. That means investing in walking, biking and transit. It means being willing to admit, for example, that Denny Way will never be a good street to drive a car, but it could be a good street for the Route 8 bus. If SDOT added bus lanes and other transit priority features so that the Route 8 bus could move faster than a crowd of 200 people dancing and playing hopsotch and leaf frog, then far more people would ride it including some of the people currently joining the daily traffic jam. However, Bruce Harrell's SDOT refuses to improve Denny Way for the 8. For someone who talks so much about revitalizing downtown, it's nonsensical that Mayor Harrell is forcing this key street to remain locked in a traffic jam with no room for growth.

Despite reaching an apparent car ceiling, Seattle has a ton of room to grow so long as we do not design that growth around the assumption that most people will be driving. By getting rid of parking requirements on new developments, housing can be built more quickly and affordably. Light rail expansion has done a lot of work, but we will also need to run more Metro bus service. Metro is still operating below 2019 service levels even though our population continues to grow. For all the attention we give to light rail, Seattle is still a bus town and will remain a bus town.

We also need to keep investing in ways to improve safety and connectivity for people walking and biking. Our bike network has finally connected through downtown and along the waterfront, but there's still a ton of work to complete the downtown network and especially to connect it to our neighborhoods. Whenever I bike in the masses riding along Westlake and 9th Ave, it feels almost as though we have started a new chapter in the city's cycling history in which biking is finally an option beyond the handful of folks (like many Seattle Bike Blog readers) who were dedicated to riding no matter what. Now we are at the beginning of biking as a viable option for the masses, and there is so much room to grow and work to do from here.