An ordinance eliminating minimum parking requirements in Bellingham raises questions about the city’s future development.
Ed.: The essays, analyses and opinions presented as Community Voices express the perspectives of their authors on topics of interest and importance to the community and are not intended to reflect perspectives on behalf of Salish Current.
Perhaps someone on the city council or in the mayor’s office can explain how we can encourage the increased housing opportunities in Bellingham — signed in November of 2024 — by utilizing infills, ADUs, townhomes, renting out parts of our houses and more, to handle our growing population, while at the same time eliminating all parking place requirements on new construction?
Developers are all for this idea, so they can build huge complexes and leave the parking to the neighborhood streets. Studies on parking presented to the council for consideration were primarily nationwide statistics.
This leads to a few more questions.
1. Why is a photo of a dying local mall parking lot on the city website representing the idea that we have too many parking spaces instead of a more realistic photograph of our Bellingham residential neighborhood streets clogged with parked cars?
2. Why does the recent executive order to “Drive Economic Opportunity” focus only on Downtown, ignoring Fairhaven completely?
3. As we grow, all those economic opportunities for living wages and filling our vacant buildings, where are those people going to park?
4. Why are bicycle lanes taking up so many parking spaces and removing needed transportation lanes for cars, when biking is seriously a sport and not an effective mode of transportation in our part of the world? Do we have a single statistic on the number of bike riders who use these main streets to get to work, school and the store year-round? Anyone with kids, bikes, pets, groceries or disabilities — and the elderly — knows that this isn’t going to happen.
5. Do we intend to encourage growth in our city until it becomes another urban failure, instead of the town we love?
6. And, finally, how many employees of the city ride their bikes to work? Those making the rules? The city council, the mayor, office workers? Has anyone done a survey on any usage patterns?
Our mass transit system doesn’t cover most areas of the city and it’s a joke to imagine it’s even a possibility. Bellingham was not meant to be a city without cars. We have hills, bad weather and an aging population. The future impact of these policies will one day be considered extremely poor planning, as we tear out the nearly unused bike lanes that cost us millions of dollars to create.
—By Taimi Dunn Gorman
Taimi Dunn Gorman was the manager of the former Bellingham Mall, a Fairhaven business owner of the Colophon Cafe, OFA Association president, customer service writer for the Bellingham Herald and local business magazines and public relations instructor at Western Washington University and Whatcom Community College. Gorman has been active in city matters, including the Greenways Projects, Samish Way Renewal and the mayor’s benchmarks committee.