Dear SDOT staff,

I am writing to you today to expand on the deep community concerns regarding the proposal to implement paid parking along Queen Anne Avenue North. As a resident whose parking will be directly displaced by this plan, as well as an active community member and patron here in Queen Anne, I want to highlight how devastating this policy will be for neighbors living directly on the commercial corridor.

I live in one of the many apartment buildings along the main avenue. My building, like most of the estimated 40 apartment buildings on the main avenue between West Lee Street and Boston Street, does not have on-site parking garages adequate for its occupants. Many of our homes are ineligible for Restricted Parking Zone (RPZ) permits. Many of us rely entirely on the current free street parking to keep our cars, which are necessary for our livelihood.

An estimated 2,500 residents live along this strip, and hundreds of us depend on these spaces for daily life. An estimated 85% of Queen Anne residents own a car. We do not use our cars to zip around the hill; we use them to commute to jobs outside of Queen Anne, as the main strip offers few employment opportunities beyond retail, dining, and neighborhood medical offices. While SDOT’s survey highlights that residents walk to local shops, walking to buy groceries does not mean we do not need a daily place to park our cars. Queen Anne is wonderfully walkable within itself, but with only two main bus routes serving the top of the hill, the vast majority of residents require cars to commute to jobs outside the neighborhood.

This proposal fails a basic logic test:

• It hurts residents: It strips a population of up to 2,500 people of their only viable parking options. This policy will make the Queen Anne main strip a less desirable and less affordable place to live, actively pushing current residents (like myself) out of the neighborhood entirely.
• It hurts visitors: Turning the street into an expensive, $4-an-hour chore will actively deter casual visitors from spending time on the hill. If SDOT's primary goal is to provide short-term visitor parking, why are they ignoring the currently enforceable time limits and the massive existing capacity at private neighborhood lots like Safeway, Trader Joe's, and CVS? The City needs to evaluate whether those customer lots are meeting the commercial need—and if not, how the City can collaborate to better utilize that existing infrastructure instead of punishing residents.
• It hurts businesses: The city claims this policy benefits the commercial district, yet local independent merchants and the Queen Anne Chamber of Commerce are in open opposition because of the former points.

If this plan satisfies neither the residents nor the businesses, it remains unclear who actually benefits, outside of adding revenue to the City's General Fund. Furthermore, pushing avenue parkers onto adjacent residential streets will completely overwhelm the side-street parking ecosystem, penalizing neighbors who already pay for RPZ permits only to find their spots taken by displaced shoppers and residents.

Every fellow resident I have spoken with was unaware of these proposed changes until now, and they are just as horrified and deeply concerned as I am. This lack of basic awareness proves that SDOT's outreach completely bypassed the very people who will be most impacted by the proposal.

Before any plan moves forward, we demand that SDOT produce a rigorous, transparent numerical analysis detailing exactly how many residents rely on non-permitted street parking, how many visitors require temporary spaces, and a full audit of available stalls for both groups (including garages, street parking, and zoned spaces). The current curb space review only focuses on businesses and visitors, not residents, and provides insufficient detail. We also demand a transparent public town hall to look at community-supported alternatives, such as:

• Adding infrastructure solutions, like a multi-level public parking structure to expand visitor parking without targeting curb space.
• Collaborating with local businesses (such as Safeway, Trader Joe's, and CVS) to expand their existing private parking for patrons and/or residents.
• Enforcing existing free time limits, which are currently largely ignored, to ensure parking flow during busy hours.
• Limiting paid or time-limited hours to peak business times (9:00 AM – 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday) to preserve evening, overnight, and weekend parking for residents.
• Expanding RPZ eligibility and zoning to all avenue residents so we aren't completely stripped of our only parking option.

If this proposal passes as currently written, living here will become unaffordable for myself and many of my neighbors, forcing us out of the community we love. We urge you to perform adequate community research, to produce sufficient relevant data, to hold a public town hall about this proposal, and to consider alternative resident-backed solutions to meet community parking needs in Upper Queen Anne.

Sincerely,
Christina Zaccagnino and below signed residents of Upper Queen Anne

Edit: This letter was written and sent to SDOT on 10/8/2026 to give voice to residents living on or near the main avenue, who were not represented in SDOT's study. The letter was turned into a petition on 10/16/2026 to garner signatures of other residents who share this view. The petition is not intended to represent all/other arguments against the proposal. Feel free to share additional arguments/perspectives by adding a comment. We will share all comments with SDOT.