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Capitol Hill Housing’s Brennan doing a nighttime count inside a Pike/Pine garage (Image: CHH)
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With the help of a Capitol Hill nonprofit, Seattle will pilot two innovative programs designed to make public transportation more affordable and better utilize the neighborhood’s apartment building parking.
Tuesday afternoon, the Seattle City Council’s transportation committee will discuss and possibly vote on the two pilot transit projects to be run by the non-profit Capitol Hill Housing and funded by the city of Seattle and King County. The projects — collectively dubbed the CHH Transportation Demand Management Pilot Project — consist of a discounted ORCA pass pilot program for low-income residents of three CHH housing projects and funding to develop a prototype sensor to gather data on parking garage usage in apartment buildings.
“Giving people more access to transit is a goal that we have and the city has, especially for low income people,” said Alex Brennan of CHH in reference to the transit pass aspect of the project. “A potentially new way to connect people with that access [to transit is to go through housing].”
The proposed CHH transit pass is almost identical to King County Metro’s existing ORCA Multifamily Passport program, which allows property owners and managers to purchase pre-loaded, monthly ORCA card transit passes to the residents of their buildings with the intention of encouraging transit and all the accompanying benefits of decreased single occupancy vehicle usage like reduced congestion, pollution, and the personal financial cost of car ownership. The key difference is that while the Multifamily Passport program forces property owners and managers to cover the cost by either splitting it with tenants or just adding it into monthly rents, the city plans to subsidize CHH to cover the costs of providing ORCA cards.
“We heard about it [the ORCA Multifamily Passport program] and we were interested. But unlike a market-rate property manager, we can’t raise your rent to pay for a pass,” said Brennan. “We started having conversations with Metro and SDOT on ways to make it more affordable and ways to raise money.” Continue reading →