Should Davis Go to Paid Parking?

parking-garage-dtDecember 3rd’s Davis City Council item was merely a warm-up to the larger debate. Most of the parking recommendations from the year-long process of the Downtown Parking Task Force seemed commonsense and low-hanging fruit.

There were concerns raised by members of the public about going to a paid parking permit at the Amtrak Train Station. One commuter noted that while $5 a day does not seem like a tremendous amount of money, it would make his total cost unaffordable.

Others were concerned about the issue of paid parking, with Councilmember Lucas Frerichs noting that he could easily and quickly support 17 of the 19 task force recommendations, but paid parking and a new parking garage were a different matter.

From my perspective, this was the piece we published on that Monday, December 2, that few people saw.

I want to be able to put my weight behind the parking proposal, but I can only put half of my weight behind it, because I do not believe it solves the entire parking problem.

Some people will say that parking is the biggest problem we have in our downtown, but as someone who works every day in the downtown, I don’t agree. The biggest problem that we have in the downtown is that the streets are poorly set up to accommodate multi-modal forms of transportation.

Try driving through downtown at a peak period either near the lunch hour or around five pm, and you have heavy traffic mixed with pedestrians mixed with bicyclists. You hit a four-way stop and it’s difficult to navigate through. Bicyclists will run stop signs, and pedestrians will move across the street. It is a nightmare and there is no way to avoid it.

Compared to that difficulty, parking is a small issue. If you are willing to walk a few blocks, parking is rarely an issue.

The graphic above illustrates the issue. Even during the peak times, there is only 85% capacity – that is 12-1 pm. There is a secondary peak time during dinner, but even that tops out at 75%.

Now according to the study, there are about 2100 parking spots available in the core. That means even at the worst times, there are still about 250 spots available and most of the time it is more like 700 spots available.

As the task force writes in their summary: “Generally speaking, the most coveted on-street parking can be very difficult to find on most days beginning with the lunch time peak and extending through the evening during the week. On-street parking and off-street parking lots and garages are underutilized.” Some of this can and will be fixed relatively easily.

For example, “Parking literature and past studies conducted in Davis confirm downtown employees occupy prime downtown parking spaces. While it is not known what percentage of the downtown parking supply is occupied by commuters throughout the day, the desire to influence employee parking behavior dates back to the 1961 Core Area Plan. If employees can be shifted from prime on-street parking spaces into the underutilized parking supply, the downtown carrying capacity can increase, stimulating economic growth.”

Those types of solutions are low-hanging fruit – they are no brainers. They reflect the fact that we do not have a parking problem, we have a distribution problem. We allow long-term parking to utilize spaces that should be short-term spaces, while forcing commuters toward the periphery.

So too is fixing the Amtrak Parking Lot situation which allows out-of-town drivers to park in the lot free of charge, making parking unavailable to other riders and users for much of the day.

And there is available parking at Fourth and G in the garage which has 199 publicly available spots that “are not fully utilized” with occupancy rates ranging from 10 percent to 59 percent.

From our standpoint, therefore, any “solution” that fixes these low-hanging fruit, these particularities of the Davis parking scheme, is a good thing.

So, we fully support the idea of increasing employee parking location options, particularly if it gets employees out of short-term commuter parking and into the garages. We fully support efforts to increase the permit fees and streamline the parking to an “X” permit. And we certainly support converting the Amtrak Lot to paid parking.

Restricting double-parking of delivery vehicles is a must – especially during peak hours – but it’s a problem at any time.

But to us, the biggest solution has to involve the biggest problem and, from our standpoint, the biggest problem is not parking by itself but the interaction of multi-modal transportation on streets designed largely for one mode – the automobile.

In the past, we have supported the idea of a large parking garage that funnels traffic away from the underpass and allows people to easily exit their vehicles at First Street and walk to their destination. Removing large amounts of vehicles from the equation may help.

At times we have pondered the idea of an automobile-free downtown; however, businesses would fret that this would harm their bottom line.

So, why not create a tiered system? Right now, they are proposing paid parking in the southeast quadrant of downtown. This, of course, has led to some believing that this would harm business. Many other downtowns charge –sometimes a lot – for parking, with little harmful impact.

The other alternative would be to make all street parking 30 minute parking. That solution allows the person who has to make a quick stop to get something from a store, or take out from a restaurant, to have the ability to park right out in front of their destination, to go in and out and leave.

But, of course, if you want to do this, right now during peak times, that is difficult to navigate through pedestrian, bike and automobile traffic at intersection after intersection.

A lot of cities have created a tiered system – the shorter term your visit, the closer you can park to your destination. For a short trip, 30 minutes or less, you can park in close on the streets, two-hour parking a bit further out and long-term parking in the garages.

The bottom line for the parking task force report – they seem to tackle a lot of the low-hanging fruit that causes us the most problems. However, the longer-term question involves the ability of the city to look toward changing transportation patterns and use parking to bolster those changes and help clean up the downtown once and for all.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

Author

  • David Greenwald

    Greenwald is the founder, editor, and executive director of the Davis Vanguard. He founded the Vanguard in 2006. David Greenwald moved to Davis in 1996 to attend Graduate School at UC Davis in Political Science. He lives in South Davis with his wife Cecilia Escamilla Greenwald and three children.

    View all posts

Categories:

Breaking News City of Davis Land Use/Open Space Transportation

94 comments

  1. Don’t think this issue and any ‘solution’ will satisfy ‘all the people all the time’. Kind of like pizza. different likes and dislikes.
    Since employee parking is mentioned as part of the problem (do we know how much?) how about trying to encourage/restrict them to a garage? I don’t like the idea of shorter free parking time asI like to park once and walk around downtown for errands instead of moving car. How about employee parking using X stickers; do you use one David? When I worked downtown I used one and parked in the Scout lot. Worked well.

  2. The one half hour time limit is not the way to go. Leave it at the current 2 hours free parking. It’s enough time to see a movie, get a meal and do some shopping.

  3. You wrote: “But to us, the biggest solution has to involve the biggest problem and from our standpoint, the biggest problem is not parking by itself but the interaction of multimodal transportation on streets designed largely for one mode – the automobile.”

    As Brian Abbanatt and Matt Kowta pointed out in their presentation to the CC, because of poor parking management/lack of effective supply, when an area reaches 90% occupancy 80-95% of cars circulating in the area are probably looking for a parking space. Thus parking and traffic volume are tightly linked. Better manage the supply and circulation declines. Of course this does not deal with the problem of cyclists engaging in dangerous behavior. That must be dealt with via other means.

    1. Robb has they been discussion about trying to direct people to the G Street lot more aggressively? (which if done before people enter the core area, could help the car circling congestion issue. )

      1. Absolutely. I don’t have the recommendations in front of me but the issue of wayfinding is included and there is a recognition that we need to help direct people into these underutilized spaces.

    1. B Nice – The short answer appears to be “no”. There is more to it than this but even adding paid parking at all will require renegotiation of the terms under which the lot was built.

  4. Davis does have a parking problem, our addiction to free parking. Free parking is a tax on everyone to pay for the convenience of a few. We should install parking meters throughout the downtown area for all on-street parking, and for all of the City owned lots. That way, the people who are paying for parking downtown are the ones who want to use the parking spaces downtown. No reason to charge those who are walking, on their bikes, or just going somewhere else, too.

    The most ridiculous aspect of this discussion though is the attempt to blame the current problem on pedestrians and bicyclists.

    1. “The most ridiculous aspect of this discussion though is the attempt to blame the current problem on pedestrians and bicyclists.”

      If you’re inferring that to my comments, that was not my intention. I was trying to suggest that the interaction at intersections that only have four way stops is a bigger problem.

    2. Get a clue… the purchase, installation, and maintenance of bicycle parking is a public subsidy, as it is for motor vehicles. I believe that merchants need to contribute more for the City maintenance of both, but there is a public benefit for economic health. We need a balance.

      Even maintaining sidewalks (‘street trees’ mess those up), are a public subsidy, as under state law they are the responsibility of the adjoining property owners, but the City has taken that responsibility on. Joint responsibility and contributions are called for.

      1. We all pay for the streets, sidewalks and bike paths. We don’t need to all pay for someone’s convenience of parking their vehicle directly in front of their chosen destination. Completely different things.

        1. I could just as easily say we don’t all need to pay for someone’s convenience of parking their bikes downtown too. We all don’t need to pay for the nice sidewalks that people who live close to downtown and don’t have to drive to use either. Are the people that don’t live close enough to downtown to make biking or walking a viable alternative going to be punished and forced to pay to park? It’s nice for some that are willing to pay for the convenience of parking closer but it comes off as elitist to those that might be on fixed budgets or to the poor. So if they can’t afford the fees they can just park farther away and be forced to walk so more open spaces can be had by those that can afford them?

          1. GI: I would be more sympathetic to your elitist argument if not for a couple factors: First, free parking would still be in relatively close proximity to downtown (less distance then people walk when shopping at a mall). Second the cost of parking is relatively low (a dollar an hour). If either of these factors were to change then I would share your concerns.

          2. Haha, a dollar an hour might be considered low by you but to many that might seem expensive. So, the ones that can’t afford to park up close can just park on the outskirts. But that’s great for the ones that can afford to pay because the poor parking farther away makes for more openings for the ones that have the money to pay for the privilege.

          3. Compared to the parking price I paid when visiting Sacramento on a school field a dollar an hour does indeed seem cheap. Since owning and maintaining a car is expensive the ability to do so also seems like a privelage. Since parking spaces come at a cost to the city maybe those privelaged enough to own a car should help pay for the spots they need to park them in.

          4. So you would make the poor walk further to get a free spot because you feel they’re privileged just to own a car while other more privileged car owners would have primo spots because they could afford the fees. If you want to compare most small towns don’t charge anything to park, so cherrypicking cities that do charge is a non starter. This is so funny because all you liberals insisted that the poor having to pay a couple extra dollars a month to buy fluoride toothpaste or drops was going to be such a hardship on the poor, but now charging them a buck an hour to park is okay. SMH

          5. I see your point, walking a few extra blocks instead of paying a dollar an hour to park, is a hardship no one, who can afford to own and maintain a car, should have to endure. It make the pain a 5 years old with an abscessed tooth seem negligible.

          6. Well back at cha, if someone can afford to own and maintain a car then for sure they should be able to spend a few bucks a month on fluoride toothpaste.

          7. Dead beat 5 year olds. When are we going to do something about them? They are such a drain on our society, plus they really shouldn’t be driving, can they even see over the steering wheel?

  5. “Free parking is a tax on everyone to pay for the convenience of a few.”

    Really, do you think most people bike and walk to downtown? When I park in the outskirts of town, in front of my own house is that also a tax on everyone? Who paid for the sidewalks for pedestrians and parking spaces for bicyclists? By your reasoning they should also have to pay a tax. We all have paid for the bikepaths, so if someone doesn’t use them are they being unfairly taxed?

    1. Getting people out of cars and onto alternate means of transportation will ultimately save the city money, so if sidewalks, bike paths, and bike parking etc. help accomplish this you could argue that they pay for themselves.

      1. For starters, if the downtown was not safely accessible by bikes a new parking structure would be necessary. From what I understand these are far more expensive then bike racks.

      2. Fixing and expanding roads are expensive endeavors. Having accessible safe alternatives to automobiles, which translates into fewer cars driving around, slows down road degradation and the need to expand road infrastructure, which translates into the city saving money.

  6. If paid parking in the core area leads to less congestion and more available parking, (for those making quick trips, have mobility issues or have little ones in tow), it’s worth far more then the dollar an hour currently being charged in the E Street Plaza, and I would gladly pay it, as long as it is not a hassle to do so. Besides having to remembering my parking space number from the time it takes me to walk from my car to the payment machine (I sometime challenging task for me), I have found paying to park at E St. plaza a simple and convenient process.

  7. I encourage the city to invest in a survey of shopper interests/needs. In my opinion, add any additional hit to convenience and kiss a percentage of downtown sales tax revenue goodbye.

    Paid parking is fine as long as there are meters close and those meters except credit/debit cards.

    The problem with our Downtown is basically one of congestion. To many bikes, pedestrians and autos crammed into a small area due to the lack of options in other areas of town.

    You can’t make it more difficult for autos when people live far away, and they are required to shop downtown for products that require an auto for transport… without causing a percentage of them to go elsewhere. Convenience is an important shopping criteria for most people because most of us have time constraints.

    Those that want the downtown to convert to a primary pedestrian and bike destination should support making downtown primarily an entertainment and boutique shop destination. Otherwise, we are forced to need a car and we need to park near the retail location that sells plywood and mulch for example.

    1. People already shop elsewhere for the convenience, which is one reason why our per capita sales tax revenues are so anemic relative to our neighbors. The additional cost of a parking meter will do nothing to change that equation, however having easier access to parking because of the meter may.

      Downtown is already an entertainment district, which makes our continued insistence on acting as if it is (and always should remain) our main retail center all the more ridiculous.

      1. “Downtown is already an entertainment district, which makes our continued insistence on acting as if it is (and always should remain) our main retail center all the more ridiculous.”
        At least as recently as 2012, Davis Downtown had 84 retail members. It is our main retail center, and if you wish to change that fact you need to update the General Plan.

        1. The Davis Downtown web site (much improved, by the way!) lists 84 retail and 91 food businesses. That is a healthy balance, and it’s not an accident. It results from planning.