By Barbara Filet Santa Monica
Your recent editorial of March 10 about the downtown parking plan blasted Kevin McKeown for favoring the environmentally superior Alternative 3B, which proposes 712 new parking spaces instead of 1,712.
I am very happy he had the courage to stand up and say “no” to a plan which greases the road for more cars downtown and more commercial development.
One of Santa Monica’s biggest environmental and quality-of-life problems is the many employees who drive into the city every day to access the 75,000 jobs in Santa Monica. Downtown Bayside District employees using heavily discounted monthly permits occupy approximately 50 percent — about 1,700 — of parking spaces in the downtown parking structures. By building 1,000 parking spaces in two tall new structures for these employee parkers in another district, the downtown parking plan aims at creating more parking for customers.
Shoppers should have first priority when it comes to downtown parking, so that the merchants can do well, which benefits us all. Santa Monica residents, when they drive to the Third Street Promenade, often complain about the inconvenience of trying to find available parking. This is not because of a lack of parking but because it’s badly managed and you can’t easily tell where it is. There’s no coordinated system keeping careful track of and clearly communicating the vacancies, as they have at the Grove. Only on Saturday evenings is there a real parking crunch.
I choose not to participate in the congestion and search for a parking place when I go to the Promenade for a movie or to dine and shop. My friend and I opt to get some exercise and ride our bikes and park them in the only secure parking place for bikes downtown: inside the parking structure on the corner of Fourth and Broadway, at the racks right across from the parking attendants. It’s our secret spot. All the structures should have such good bike parking where you can safely leave a bike for hours.
Increasing the supply of parking is not the only solution to a perceived lack of parking. Better management of what we have and reducing the numbers of employees who drive in would solve numerous problems.
Reducing demand is also more cost-effective than increasing supply. Projected construction costs are already out of date. At prevailing costs, the city needs to budget at least $45,000 for each new parking space, or $45,000,000 for 1,000 new spaces. Projected numbers only budget $22,000 to $25,000 per space which ignores the skyrocketing cost of land downtown and increased cost of construction materials. The city may be able to purchase the land but not have enough money to build the parking. This could result in precious downtown land lying fallow for years as surface parking lots.
Redevelopment funds are a valuable resource for our community. They should not be used in the downtown to acquire property, possibly through eminent domain. These parking structures would be plunked down a few blocks from the Promenade to facilitate future commercial development which may never materialize or be acceptable to the greater Santa Monica community. $45,000,000 is a lot of public money for housing cars. The best use of that money and scarce land downtown may be for workforce housing, which could provide more built-in customers for downtown businesses and the future Exposition Light Rail line station at Fourth and Colorado. Residents could walk to access the business district and not require parking facilities.
Downtown merchants should live within their boundaries and means, and carefully budget their available parking between customers and employees. Alternative 3B would add 712 new parking spaces. That should suffice until we get our own light rail on the old Exposition Corridor. Should merchants need more parking for customers, they can give employees more incentives to commute by other means.
Subsidized parking for employees is not appropriate in an urban area such as our downtown with excellent transit service.
These measures can be integrated into a parking plan to reduce employee demand: 1. On Saturday evenings, do not allow discounts for employees since parking is constrained, except for employees who are handicapped or in registered car pools. 2. Adopt an “Eco Pass” — free-to-the-user — transit pass program for downtown employees, similar to UCLA’s BruinGo program, instead of offering subsidized monthly parking permits, except for registered carpools and handicapped persons. 3. Encourage commuting by bicycle by building a network of bike lanes in the downtown such as those on Main Street and Montana Avenue. 4. Provide secure parking for human-scaled vehicles such as bikes and scooters in each parking structure, within view of parking attendants, or in a fenced area, with shower facilities and lockers for commuter bicyclists. 5. Educate customers and residents with a “transit and bicycle first” policy to further lower demand for new parking. 6. Track and communicate existing parking supply downtown to drivers by computer signage and radio broadcasts to manage it more effectively. 7. The Bayside District could help build work-force housing downtown. 8. Implement a program to help employers hire locally, such as exists in West Hollywood, so that employees are more likely to live in the area. 9. Offer a counseling program to advise those employees who want to switch over to sustainable travel modes.
Do we care more about our kids or our cars? If we give in to the insatiable demand for car parking and invite ever more autos into our downtown, what kind of planet will we leave our children? Do we want to spend limited resources to house our cars or our kids?
For Earth Day, celebrated on the Third Street Promenade on Saturday, April 15, the Westside Greens, the Sustainable Transport Club, the Green Depot and the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition will have a booth with various greener vehicles. Come see what the future looks
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 17, 2006. Read the original PDF.