The Station At Othello Park. 351 apartments, 330 parking spaces.

The Seattle Times' "Truth Needle" column, the paper's semiregular takedown of local politicians who play fast and loose with the facts, is dedicated today to Mayor Mike McGinn's proposal to lift minimum parking requirements. (McGinn's plan would do away with the requirement for new developments in dense areas near frequent transit service.) The big reveal of the piece, which was written by city hall reporter Lynn Thompson, is that McGinn got his numbers wrong on how many households in Seattle don't have cars. It's 16 percent, Thompson writes, not 19 percent as McGinn claims. ("He misspoke," McGinn's spokesman Aaron Pickus says.) At any rate, the lower stat Thompson cites still puts Seattle at number 50 among the US cities with the largest number of households without access to a car.

Calling that 16 percent figure itself "squishy," Thompson next turns to a stat that seems cherry-picked to back the Times' agenda to continue requiring developers to build parking: The fact that just 11 percent of households with one employed worker lack a car. "That means," she concludes, that "the overwhelming number of people who work, drive.

"If Seattle has more apartment buildings without parking, is that better or worse for the working class?"

But Thompson's asking the wrong question. In fact, the sheer number of people with access to a car is much less relevant than who those people are. Among very high-income Seattleites, Thompson is right: Lots of them drive to work. In 2009, according to Census stats put together by Seattle Transit Blog , nearly two-thirds of all Seattle employees making more than $75,000 a year drove to work; meanwhile, just 44 percent of workers under the poverty line did. Of those over 65, 28 percent did not have access to an automobile.[pullquote]As millennials cluster in cities, they're seeing less need to have a license or own a car. King County's largely suburban expanse is wicked different than Seattle's dense urban core—where McGinn's proposal is relevant.[/pullquote]

(And, for what feels like the millionth time: The deregulation proposal does not eliminate parking. It merely allows developers to build as much parking as their buyers or renters---most of them not very low-income---demand. There will still be parking in new developments---as the Station at Othello Park, which is not subject to parking minimums, demonstrates).

And McGinn makes a good point. As young people---who are more likely to live in smaller, newer apartments and condos---move here, the demand for cars is likely to decrease. Although Thompson acknowledges that the number of young people getting their licenses has dropped precipitously nationwide, she counters that fact with cherry-picked stats from King County as a whole, which show that the percentage of 16-year-olds getting their licenses throughout King County has gone up.

But that's exactly the point: As millennials cluster in cities, they're seeing less need to have a license or own a car. King County's largely suburban expanse is wicked different than Seattle's dense urban core (which is, by the way, the only area in which McGinn is proposing parking deregulation.)

Finally, Thompson kvetches that McGinn's claims about increased bike numbers---up 105 percent between 2000 and 2010, no thanks to a maritime industry that has spent years fighting needed safety improvements on the city's most popular bike route in court---are misleading because there still aren't a lot of people biking to work, just 3.6 percent. But that's a chicken and egg problem. For a paper that popularized the derisive term "Mayor McSchwinn" and has consistently opposed investments in our city's barely-there biking infrastructure, it's pretty bold to claim that doubling ridership in the last ten years represents merely a "modest" gain for cyclists.