Rent goes up. If you don't like paying high rent, move to Texas.
If you want lots of cheap parking, you move to Texas.
As for rent going up as a fact of life, that's silly. Rent goes up because demand increases faster than supply. That's something you can fix by increasingly supply. And since high rent just reduces your income, it doesn't make sense not to.
FWIW, I've lived in Seattle and can understand your frustration --- the system there isn't great. When you live in a city with a good transit system you use it for your commute to work and day-to-day things and rent a car (services like Zipcar have made this easier than ever before) every once in a while when you really need it.
For people under 30, not owning a car is becoming increasingly the rule. And I know several above-30 types without cars. They may rely on transit-only (a city designed to be unfriendly to cars is much friendlier to transit and walking), hire cars as needed, or use a car-share service (which still greatly reduces car dependence and parking requirements). Self-driving vehicles which can park themselves elsewhere are another obvious solution.
In crowded cities, cars aren't faster than buses (though they're typically more flexible for multi-stop trips), and parking requirements at your destination greatly increase costs ($20 - $50+/day isn't unusual).
And especially not faster than a well-designed subway system
> If you don't like paying high rent, move to Texas.
Sadly, not so much true these days, although here in Austin you can make 100% of your mortgage back via Airbnb or having roommates.
(And car2go actually launched in Germany about 2 years before Austin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car2Go)
I love it - it wouldn't be Seattle to me if I couldn't get out on the weekends, but I don't think other folk of any sort - but particularly the large number of people living in Seattle on less than I am - should be subsidizing my toys. And, as such, I don't think we should be requiring parking for new construction.
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º I do know one solo 50-something who manages to go carless and, like our 20 something friends, I don't think she's missing much. She's got a great network of folk with cars to ferry her to the mountains and she (and they) are out there nearly every weekend in the summer.
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I also do know of a lot of people outside of my social circle who have 2 cars per couple and live in places like Puyallup and commute an hour plus each way into downtown Seattle everyday. Seattle is not immune to car culture, but those choices are either economic, or based on a culture I'm not part of. I'm fairly certain the suburbs, and exurbs, shouldn't be driving Seattle's city planning.
That just completely depends on where you live.
I don't think that's true: the underlying point is that car owners should pay something closer to the total cost of ownership, rather than baking large parts of the cost of ownership into the larger society.
I highly recommend bicycle; I commute daily from bainbridge island to downtown Seattle. It's a little under 12 miles a day.
Having lived downtown, I can say that a car isn't needed as you can walk to 99.9% of where you need to be. That being said, living downtown is often times very limiting if you have aspirations of living freely. (Personally, I hate having neighbors that I can't control since I prefer quiet.)
Any time a city mandates that developers install parking, that's exactly what happens: car owners are being subsidized. Car owners have come to expect free or cheap parking.
Cities don't actually need to mandate parking. If they just left developers to decide, then they'd only build parking if it was profitable. That means that the market price for parking would rise until it made economic sense to construct parking.
This is a (I would say, the only) sensible way to do things, but car owners would revolt, because they apparently hate the idea of paying for what they use.
And just for the record, I do own a car, and live in a city.
Hopefully you (and your friends) will be in the minority soon.