Editor’s note: Pacific NW magazine’s weekly Backstory provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the writer’s process or an extra tidbit that accompanies our cover story. This week’s cover introduces you to a few of the 23,329 people who keep Sea-Tac Airport humming 24/7.
IN RESEARCHING LIFE at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, a memorable sight always greeted me as I drove up.
It was the mammoth seven-story Sea-Tac concrete garage, with its looming, rounded corners. A fine example of brutalist architecture.
The garage is so huge that it’s listed as the world’s second-largest parking lot, with around 13,000 spaces: 10,500 for public parking and the rest for shuttles, taxis and the like. (The online geography site WorldAtlas.com gives No. 1 honors to the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, which can accommodate 20,000 vehicles.)
I talked about it with Susnios Tesfaye, the airport’s parking manager.
For one thing, unlike in the movies, where a guy just drops a car at the airport and it sits there for weeks with a body in the trunk, here there is no anonymity. Every night, a vehicle with a camera captures the license plates of all cars, says Tesfaye.
If the cars are there for a month, the owners get a certified letter. Five vehicles a month are abandoned. “Sometimes the repo comes and gets them,” says Tesfaye.
Memorable incidents have happened here, such as on Dec. 3, 2021, when 10 cars on the fourth floor caught fire. “ZERO visibility” because of heavy black smoke made it hard at first to locate them, says the report by the Port of Seattle’s Fire Department, which has a base at the airport.
Most of the 10 vehicles were “total losses.” The port says repairs to the garage were about $475,000, to restore damaged concrete and melted lighting systems. It said, “Initial reports indicate no malicious intent,” but no cause was determined.
Two things stand out for the typical user of the garage.
No. 1 is trying to find an open parking space and the endless circling, floor after floor. Why not just drive right up to the rooftop? Tesfaye says that’s a good plan. There is always space. What’s the big deal if you’re taking an elevator? If you’re the kind who actually plans ahead, the airport offers online prebooking at the garage.
No. 2 is the cost: $6/hour, $34/day, $169 for a week. Parking on Floor 4, which leads directly to the skybridge, is more: $7/hour, $42/day, $294/week.
Recently I went through the same math many of you have done.
My wife and I were flying to California on a four-day trip for a wedding. She had an injury that made walking an issue. I could have gone with a cheaper private lot, such as WallyPark, but that would have meant dropping my wife off at check-in, driving some distance, taking a shuttle back and letting her hang around.
Our total Sea-Tac garage parking fee was $169.
It turns out lots of you are willing to cough up such money.
“It’s supply and demand. If the parking fills up 80% of the time, that means the rate is too low,” says Tesfaye.
Right now, most of the time, the split is 80/20, and sometimes 100% full.
On May 1, as it does once a year, the port decided on new parking rates. No surprise. On June 1, general parking is going up by $2 per hour, as will other parking categories.
You’ll do the math of dollars vs. convenience. You’ll pay.