could UW N5 parking lot be used for ADA parking on cherry blossom weekends?
During the cherry blossom festival at the University of Washington, on the weekends when all nearby street parking was clogged and the parking garages were nearly full, the N5 lot near the Quad was closed to cars, with security guards coning it off.
I don't know what the rationale is. Obviously it would be beneficial to the public to be able to use those spots. But presumably they were worried that once those spots were full, there would be a line of cars winding slowly through the lot waiting for people to leave, and then there would be another line of cars snaking down Memorial Way trying to get into *that* line, so they just closed the whole thing to avoid a mess.
But to an engineer, it's painful to see an obviously useful resource get squandered. It also contributed to the slow line of cars snaking constantly through the Central Parking Garage instead and the clogging of parking on surrounding streets.
The solution would seem to be to limit the lot to some subset of users that is large enough that the lot would be effectively utilized, but limited enough that it wouldn't create a traffic jam. And one option would be to limit it to ADA parking.
Arguments in favor of this:
- The ADA parking spots in Central Parking Garage were about 80% full on cherry blossom weekend.
- The line of cars snaking through Central Parking Garage was not only slow but probably also risky to pedestrians leaving and returning to their cars, so presumably even more risky to ADA users.
- The N5 lot is almost as close to the Quad as Central Parking Garage, and you can get from N5 to the Quad without taking an elevator.
On the other hand, I don't know anything about how this type of planning works; is there some legal or logistical reason this would be a bad idea?