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Community thoughts by Christian Boyce
Selling parking permits to businesses to allow their employees to park in residential preferential parking zones isn't the worst idea I've ever heard. It might even be a good idea. However, the staff report l eaves too many questions unanswered to make me feel comfortable moving forward with the idea at this time.
I've followed this issue closely, and participated in both of the public meetings held at Virginia Park. In fact, I led one of the break-out sessions at the second meeting, at acting Planning Director Andy Agle's request.
Those meetings, and the staff report, did not provide answers to these (and other) questions:
1. How will we measure the success of this "pilot program?" This is a critical question to have answered.
2. How can we justify extending the sale of permits to businesses in other areas (Ocean Park area, Pico near Trader Joe, etc.) based on what happens in the 10th and Pico area? Staff makes it plain that 10th and Pico is the easiest area to try things out in, based in part on low levels of resident resistance. The other areas studied are all much more problematic. To expand the program into the difficult areas based on what happens in the easy area seems foolish-- especially when the criteria for success are not stated. One could start with the most difficult and work down-- that would be reasonable. "Testing" things in the easiest manner available is not reasonable.
3. Why is this program offered to businesses, and not to high school and college students? Their need for parking is great, and their money (for permits) is just as green. For that matter, what justification is there for favoring any segment of the population over another when it comes to parking on the public streets? Might this be difficult legally?
4. How can we accept a program that is based on staff requesting employees to be on their best behavior when parking in residential neighborhoods? If that was all it took we'd hardly need regulations at all, nor enforcement. It strikes me as naive to expect people to park further away from their workplaces simply because staff has asked them to.
5. Related to #4, how can we properly protect those residents living closest to the business areas? These people-- especially those living adjacent to alleys-- are already impacted by business traffic, noise, and congestion more than their neighbors down the street are. Is it right to implement a system that is almost sure to cause additional hardship on the people near Pico and Ocean Park?
6. What are other cities doing? I've done my own research and have found that my own hometown-- Davis, California-- has been testing its own mixed-use parking zone in the areas surrounding downtown and adjacent to UC Davis for almost a year already. (Their system does protect the residents closest to the ends of the block.) Why are we not looking at what others have done, rather than put our own residents through a year-long "test" that not only may be painful, but has no stated criteria for measuring success? I've corresponded with both the Executive Director of the Davis Downtown Business Association and a Senior Civil Engineer in the City of Davis' Public Works Department and learned a lot. I'd be happy to put you in touch with the people I talked to-- might save us a painful year of "experimenting."
7. Where is the data that suggests that employee parking in residential preferential parking zones is necessary? Is it just a gut feeling?
8. Why are we not requiring that the proposed employee parking permits be issued ONLY to carpools? Have we forgotten about our goals of reducing car trips, congestion, pollution, etc.? Presumably the City is able to make the rules when it comes to these permits-- if we must issue them, let's at least do so in a way consistent with the goals of the City and its residents.
9. What's in it for residents?
10. If this plan were to go forward you would be setting yourself (and future Councils) up for many, many more nights of people coming to you to make their cases for preferential parking, except now you'd get business people in addition to the residents who are doing it already. Looking at the data in the staff report makes my head swim-- surely there's a better way than this block-by-block study. The thought that we would be setting off down a road that we already don't like-- that is, the endless debates about what the parking restrictions should be on this block or that-- doesn't make sense. Why not create a REAL parking plan for all of Santa Monica, with measurable goals, rather than do things that perpetuate a patchwork system of regulating parking a block or two at a time?
11. What alternatives were considered? There certainly are some: shuttle from the beach lots, shuttle from the Civic Center, selling a limited number of permits for parking in certain sections of Virginia Park's parking lots, selling permits that allow unrestricted parking in metered spaces, issuing free passes for employees to use on the City's own Big Blue Bus. (Bus passes would seem to be an especially good fit here, as buses serve Pico Boulevard every 10 minutes, and Ocean Park Boulevard every 15.)
Staff seems to be starting with the idea that "employees need a place to park." I would start with "employees need to be able to get to their jobs in a timely and reasonably convenient manner." Free bus passes don't do anything to solve the "employees need a place to park" problem, but they certainly solve the problem of getting people to their jobs in a timely and reasonably convenient manner.
In closing, we don't need more data, more studies, more experiments. What we need are more answers. Let's be sure we have those answers before embarking on a year-long "experiment" at the expense of the livability of our residential neighborhoods.
Christian Boyce