to the city, there are 13,500 paid parking spots in Seattle. According to the US Census Bureau , there are (at least) 400,000 cars in Seattle. No, it's not an exact correlation---people often park for short periods and drive away, and Seattle has plenty of heavily used private parking lots---but the fact that there are more than 29 cars for every paid parking space suggests an imbalance. And the city isn't actually "rak[ing] in the money," as the story puts it. After enforcement costs, the city makes about $9 million on parking a year. Meanwhile, as Seattle Weekly points out , parking scofflaws currently owe $52 million to the city---a figure that dwarfs parking-fine revenues. And on-street parking in Seattle is cheap ---just $2 an hour, compared to $10 or more in private downtown lots. If anything, the city should increase the cost of parking to keep up with the private market. Finally, the Times writes about paid parking as if it was a nefarious social-engineering experiment designed to get people out of their cars ("New parking laws and stiffer penalties are supposed to make driving less attractive.") And while there may be some truth to that---the story quotes Department of Planning and Development spokesman Bryan Stevens saying "People will change their patterns as it becomes more difficult to drive and park"---it's also true that parking is remarkably insensitive to price: When the city raised the commercial parking tax to 10 percent, people kept parking, and revenues from parking taxes,