By Ocean Park Association Santa Monica
The Sunday farmers market on Main Street, originally conceived as a means to stimulate business along Main Street, has far exceeded its initial expectations for success and is now drawing visitors from places as far away from Ocean Park as the San Fernando Valley.
We wholly support the presence of a farmers market in our neighborhood. However, the large number of drivers seeking to park in the area on Sundays has created serious impacts for both local residents and for businesses on Main Street.
There is simply not enough parking on the residential streets adjacent to the Sunday market to accommodate the needs of residents, market visitors and Main Street establishments.
As a consequence, vehicles spend a great deal of time circling residential streets in search of scarce parking spaces during the operation of the Main Street market. This unnecessary traffic is unsustainable, for it promotes wasteful use of gasoline and fouls the air with exhaust and brake dust. It is also contrary to the goals of the market, which seeks to sell locally grown and often organic produce, so as to reduce the consumption of fuel and the emission of pollutants.
In addition, circling drivers and double-parked vehicles pose a threat to public safety, as they put pedestrians, especially children, at risk.
Affordable measures are available to lessen this traffic: 1. Use of the beach lots for market parking: These lots are empty most Sunday mornings and don’t even fill up until the afternoon on hot summer days. 2. Signs at the market and elsewhere in the neighborhood directing people to parking options other than residential streets. 3. Placing more bike racks at the farmers market. At a recent market the three available bike racks were full by 9 am. 4. Use of the parking lot at John Muir School and SMASH. 5. Installing diagonal parking on Main and Third Street to increase the number of available spaces. If necessary, the costs of this program could be covered by the use of parking meters, with cars with preferential parking permits being exempt. 6. Providing parking at the Civic Center, which is largely empty on Sundays, to market shoppers arriving via the 10 Freeway and a shuttle service to and from the market. The owners of the Victorian previously tried to utilize a zoo tram they acquired to shuttle market visitors from the beach lots, but their efforts ceased for reasons unknown to us. Perhaps this tram or an electric bus could be deployed as a Civic Center parking shuttle for the market. 7. Expanding the hours of operation of the Tide Shuttle to include Sunday mornings, and perhaps also Wednesday and Saturday mornings to service the city’s two other markets. 8. Requiring payment for the metered spaces on Main Street starting at 9 a.m. instead of 1 p.m. on Sundays, which would increase the turnover of these spaces. 9. Closing a portion of Main Street to vehicular traffic, as is done for the downtown markets, and staging the market on the street, with vendors’ booths placed in the middle facing retail establishments. We hope you will give our concerns your serious consideration and undertake some, if not all, of our proposed remedies to the deficit of parking for the Sunday market. If these measures are not possible, then perhaps it’s time to consider relocating the market to some place such as the Crescent Bay Park with parking provided for a charge at the adjacent beach lot.
Many thanks for your time and attention.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 20, 2006. Read the original PDF.