We are a week a way from the continuation of the March 5 meeting on paid parking – the new meeting will be held as a continuation on Monday, March 25, at 6:30 pm. A key question will be whether a compromise can be reached to avoid a direct conflict between the city council and downtown business community – which is overwhelmingly against the proposal for paid parking.
Mayor Brett Lee last week, speaking at the State of the City Address in front of Chamber members, struck a relatively conciliatory note.
“Council is supportive of downtown,” he said. “We have good intentions.
At the same time, he struck down the idea that the city has the resources for additional parking supply.
“The city has limited resources,” he said. “We don’t have $20 million for a (new) parking garage.
“With paid parking there is this understandable dislike for having to pay for parking,” he explained. “One of the ideas is to have paid parking because we don’t have the ability financially to build a new garage.”
A key stat that has been cited has been the fact that between 15 and 25 percent of those parking in the core are employees rather than customers.
The mayor also noted that a “good chunk of the people parking in the downtown are employees or actual students.” He said, “The question is how do we incentivize folks to not use parking spaces which 
would be better used by people who are shopping in our downtown?
“It’s kind of a tricky situation,” he said. “I would say that the council is open minded, we want to do what will support downtown.”
He added that paid parking is still an open question for the council.
“When you look at the big picture, it is no surprise that we would look at the idea of paid parking,” he said.
Another member of the council suggested to the Vanguard that the area for compromise might be in the number of parking meters, rather than their existence.
Meanwhile, Alzada Knickerbocker, a business owner who served on the parking task force, continues to speak out against the proposal.
She noted the heavy opposition to installing meters in the downtown. She wrote in an op-ed this weekend, “The majority of residents and downtown business owners speaking at the meeting also asked the council for a no vote. Shoppers are continuing to sign petitions at downtown businesses that will further augment the current numbers.”
She cited among the reasons for opposing the parking meters: “It’ll change the community feel of our downtown. It’ll be one more reason to keep customers away and compel them to shop online or in surrounding communities.”
In arguing, “Only during certain times of the day and week is parking an issue,” she suggested as an alternative, “Paid parking could be installed incrementally — in the F Street lot, for example — and, where it currently exists, extended into the evening.”
But like others, Ms. Knickerbocker did not seem to understand that one of the reasons that customers may stay away and go shop elsewhere is the difficulty of finding parking downtown.
While she is correct that only during certain times of the day is parking an issue, those times are problematic – the lunch hour and after about 3 pm any given day of the week.
She also suggested “other mitigating solutions,” including “most notably exploring availability of existing parking, including permit parking purchasing by businesses for their employees and improving transit options into the downtown.”
Frankly this is the key point – given the cited 15 to 25 percent of parking traffic being downtown employees, the business owners actually control much of their own fate. But to date, they have done little to resolve this problem.
At the current time, there is not a parking supply issue. Rather, what the city and consultant data show is that there is a distribution issue – with areas like the south east portion of the downtown being heavily concentrated with filled parking, and outlying areas to the north including the G and 4th garage having plenty of excess capacity.
A better distribution of that could solve the problems. But the city has proposed to use a system that charges people for parking as that solution. If there is to be another solution, it must come from the downtown businesses themselves.
Ms. Knickerbocker writes: “Before the council on March 25 will be the most extreme and costly remedy of all, one least capable of reversing. Most who patronize our downtown are opposed to such a measure. We call upon the council to seek solutions that will retain the friendliness and accessibility of the center of our town. We ask that the council reject metered parking where residents live, work and shop.”
At the end of the day, if council is to reject metered parking, they still have to find a solution because the current system is not working and is not sustainable into the future. Ms. Knickerbocker, while opposing paid parking, has put forward some vague ideas that could form the basis of a lasting compromise – but they need to be more specific and there need to be firm commitments from the downtown businesses.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
No they don’t. The business owners can’t really control where their employees park. And those employees are part of our community. They work here, they buy lunch here, and they serve you at the businesses that you visit. This is not their problem to solve.
Cut the price of the X permits by 90% if you want to incentivize low-wage workers to use them.
Don – I disagree. I let me employees know not to park on the street. I can’t necessarily stop them, but I can make it part of their expectations.
Do they get in trouble if they are a few minutes late to work?
Mine don’t. They usually message me if they are running behind.
Decades of experience says you are wrong on this, DG. Employee behavior has never changed. Accept it.
Follow the money if you want to understand what is going on with the staff and consultant proposals.
The city is projecting making over $100,000 a year off of X permits. They aren’t going to give that up even if lowering the cost would actually improve things.
Right now the new Richards lot sits almost completely empty everyday. They could offer people who work downtown free permits to park in that lot freeing up spaces downtown but that would lower the potential revenue from X permits.
You are assuming this is actually about parking when the reality its about monetizing parking downtown. Dan Carson told me as much last Friday. He told me that by going to 12/7 and adding in the train depot parking lot the city could net around $300,000 a year that he would like to use on adding surface supply. Of course the money will go into the general fund that has a structural deficit so there is no guarantee as to how the money will be spent.
Currently there are two yes votes, Carson and Lee, but they need a third vote. Frierichs and Partida together can block any part of the proposal they both say no on. Partida ran on not pricing lower income citizens out of downtown and Frierichs has voted no on street meters in the past. It will be a nail biter.
I don’t agree that it’s about monetizing the downtown – the models I’ve seen show it’s not enough revenue to do much more than cover costs.
There are three votes to do something with paid parking – probably not the full proposal however.
Not enough revenue David, that is the sad part, most of the money goes to the parking industry. I actually agree with you but I’m summarizing that part of my conversation with Carson. Its not about what you or I think, we don’t get a vote on this.
The only value from implementing paid parking downtown is to better manage the available parking supply, something we will need in place if we are going to successfully redevelop the downtown. If the goal or approach is focused on revenue generation, however, then those driving the process do not understand either the research or current best practices. Ron and others have pointed out some serious flaws in the current proposal, and I agree with Ron that those flaws point to an inappropriate focus on monetizing parking rather than managing it. The CC needs to be smarter than that. Do this the right way, or don’t do it at all.
For the record, I won’t decide how to vote on the city staff recommendation until I have had a chance to talk to my colleagues collectively about this matter when we meet on Monday. Also for the record, this is not is about generating revenue for the city General Fund. According to the city staff report we were presented last week, depending upon how it was implemented, the proposed parking management program could result in a net gain for the special fund where these monies would go. Under the city staff proposal, not a nickel would go to the General Fund, it would all be earmarked for downtown improvements. I welcome the community discussion that is now going on in these pages and the personal conversations I’ve had with folks like Ron on this matter.
Okay Dan, we will count your vote when you make it. My takeaway was that you want the parking revenue for as you said “To build more surface parking.”
I was speculating on where the votes are as I see things. Of course if you can’t get to three why spend political capital. I get that.
Per the Davis Downtown Parking Survey 2018:
90% of employees are familiar with the current X-permit parking locations.
72% of employers share information about the benefits of X-permit parking with their employees
43% purchase X-permits for their employees.
39% of those who do not do so cite cost.
51.4% say there is not an adequate supply of X-permit spaces “available when your employees need them.”
So here’s a proposal.
Have the city provide, free, an X-permit to any employee who presents a current pay stub at City Hall.
Provide employers with less than 10 employees with a certain number of X-permits at 50% of regular cost to provide to their employees.
Defer the paid parking proposal for one year. Assess the effectiveness of reduced-cost X-permit parking at the end of one year, with parking meters as the preferred option if the results are not sufficient in terms of reducing parking demand during peak periods.
“51.4% say there is not an adequate supply of X-permit spaces “available when your employees need them.””
This is a real problem that I discovered when the Spencer Alley was being renovated and had to use the X-permit.
I was suggesting a six month check-in rather than a year.
So why should us citizens subsidize downtown businesses further? Why not require each business to by an X permit for each employee instead? In fact, the business community should step up and make this offer if they fear the impacts of paid parking. There is no reason why other citizens should be trying to solve a problem for these business owners when the owners reject the solution. And a solution in which those business owners demand that it be solved through a subsidy (yes, a subsidy–I thought conservatives were against these) to them is unacceptable. I will most certainly campaign against such a solution.
1. I didn’t demand anything.
2. I’m not a conservative.
Maybe you could tone down your rhetoric.
Because you can’t. From experience being on the parking committee.
Here’s another view…
Status Quo: city pays to maintain, signing/striping, enforcing parking in the Core… with parking zones/limits requested by downtown merchants/businesses… a loss of GF to support what businesses have asked for, as they saw it benefitting them.
Businesses want more done to increase their profits… again, at City expense, with maybe a tad of that offset by new sales/business tax revenues… the hole is dug deeper… more transit, more pavement/facilities to be maintained, at GF expense, not the businesses.
Paid parking needs to be a zero sum game for the City, or slight ‘profit’. The City stands to gain if the paid parking program results in DT businesses increased sales (and profits), hence increases in revenues from sales tax and business taxes. Sounds reasonable.
Another option would be for the City to stop maintaining, signing/striping, enforcing parking limits, and accept what results. There would probably be far fewer expenses to the City, and unknown impacts to current revenue. Might be a cool experiment.
The latter two options seem to be the most ‘sustainable’. The latter one could even more greatly incentivize folk to not use cars,and move to bicycle, pedestrian and transit modes (using current transit).
Will be interesting….
We have a recognized shortage of parking at certain hours of the day downtown. This is not a new phenomenon, but one we have been trying to address for a couple of decades, so far without success. We have, roughly speaking, two options. Increase the supply of parking downtown, or better manage the supply that we have. Paid parking is the preferred method for supply management and it is something that should be implemented so that we either delay or eliminate the need for building more supply.
Paid parking does not need to be revenue neutral, it needs to operate at a cost significantly less than the cost of building new inventory. We should only be charging the amount for parking that is required to get the desired impact on availability, not the amount necessary for creating an artificially ‘net neutral’ budget. If that means that most of the day parking is free, then that is what we should do. As we redevelop the downtown the demand for parking is likely to increase and the fees necessary to properly manage our supply may well be greater than what they are today. Having the system in place and operating allows for continuous management of supply during these changes in demand. We are investing in a parking management system that will be necessary if we want our future downtown to be vibrant and fiscally sustainable.
Mark… not sure whether you are in essential agreement with what you quoted from my post, with additional nuances (which I agree with) or substantially disagreeing with what I posted…
I basically am of the opinion that parking management is what is needed now, and the near future. I’m in substantial agreement with your statements re: parking management…
As to Re-Dev, that is a separate issue, with its own challenges and opportunities… I’m thinking of the ‘now’ and next 5 years, and agree that doing the paid parking now would provide additional tools for future decisions and needs.
Bill – First sentence, second paragraph directly answers your question. “Paid parking does not need to be revenue neutral…”
I think the desire to be ‘zero-sum’ as you put it, is what is driving the poor choices to both over-charge during the slow periods and over-enforce during the extended times and days. Overcharging and overenforcement are the two big negatives I see with the current proposal.
I’m a supporter of responsible payment for use of the public ROW.
I’m confused about how the Downtown Parking Plan includes Davis Depot but that the Depot Access Study is not apparently also about Downtown.
Discussion of public transport access is still mostly missing from these most recent conversations. Won’t people agree that it’s reasonable for parking fees to cover transit access?
Given our density, competition from cars (paid parking or not) and traffic congestion inherent in a Lyft/Uber solution, I still very much like the idea of electric-powered autonomous shuttles on fixed routes, operating point-to-point service to and from Davis Depot and around E St. – dependent partly on train schedules and partly on evening needs of Downtown, and e.g. the Farmers’ Market. These would terminate at these locations (so the same vehicle would serve both the departing and arriving passengers of a particular train). They would run 24/7, be fully-ADA. A 12-person capacity with a 30-minute headway, a fleet of 30 that reach that many areas in the city, could deliver 720 people to Downtown per hour, certainly enough to transform both the Davis Depot triangle and E St. Parking Plaza into something other than private vehicle storage.
Up front costs would be high – perhaps 7.5 million for the vehicles alone – but running costs – with full solar and just a few staff to oversee the situation – are low and the scheme is very, very grant-friendly. Probably some kind of fee is appropriate… $1 per roundtrip?
The decrease in vehicle traffic that results would, on its own, improve pedestrian and bicycle access to Downtown. How much could the City get for sale of the Davis Depot parking lot for an appropriate commercial development? Can peripheral parking lot owners support it so that e.g. people arriving from 80 and 113 could use it instead of entering the Downtown with their cars?
All modes, all uses? Apportioned as to mode class? Cars for car parking, bikes for bike parking, pedestrians for sidewalks, etc.? Looking for clarification… if you mean all modes paying for their proportional share of all costs associated with their use, I don’t philosophically disagree…
Free X permits, controlled by the employer, with parking north of 5th street and east of the tracks will add hundreds of parking spaces. We only need a few dozen more employees to park outside the core at peak times to make a difference. I am not against the idea of paid parking but it needs to be in concert with the big picture.
When we look outside of Davis the trends in this country are toward more housing in the downtowns with less parking. I think this is exactly what the new downtown core plan will embrace. Which means we need parking solutions today that will be relevant in the future.
We can also add hundreds of parking spaces, on gravel lots, on the periphery of Davis.
How long have we had X permits and why haven’t they made the difference already?
I agree, and that means better inventory management, otherwise known as properly implemented paid parking.
Just speculating here, but I’d guess that for owners of smaller businesses it is a cost issue, just as it is for the employees. Hence my suggestion that we reduce or eliminate the cost on a trial basis, before going to the expense of installing parking meters.
So you want to replace one subsidy (free parking) with another (free X permit)?
I see no reason to continue either subsidy. Instead, we should get rid of the X permits, turn the surface parking lots used for the program into tax-paying commercial/residential construction (selling the land in the process if it is City owned) and manage the on-street inventory with meters, charging the minimum amount required. If you want to park a car in an area where the parking inventory is constrained, you should expect to pay. No one else should need to subsidize your choice.
The real beneficiary of these subsidies are the property owners as the subsidies artificially increase the value of the properties and the rents the owners are able to charge. I see no value in taxpayers subsidizing wealthy property owners.
Yes. That is exactly what I want to do.
I’m also happy to pay, as a taxpayer and local consumer, to subsidize open spaces, parks, greenbelts, tennis courts, swimming pools, libraries, public schools, bicycle parking, and myriad other things I don’t personally use. Nor do I begrudge those uses of my tax dollars, which apparently you all prefer to call subsidies.
Some of which have usage fees much akin to paid parking.
More to the point though, Don, which of the items you list provide a direct financial benefit to nearby businesses or property owners in the way that publically owned free parking does?
Which of them generate revenues for the city in the form of sales and property taxes? Is the downtown a net generator of revenues, or a net cost to the city? How about the libraries, schools, greenbelts, parks, tennis courts?
It’s time to call this notion that we are ‘subsidizing’ parking what it is: rhetorical nonsense. We use public funds to provide many things that benefit the public, often in disproportionate amounts. Sports facilities are an excellent case in point. Call everything a subsidy if it uses tax dollars, then, if you want to be consistent, and please insist that everyone everywhere pull their own weight.
We don’t know. You might think that answering that question would have been one of the first steps of the CASP process so we might focus our planning on addressing the issue if necessary, but to my knowledge that analysis is not publicly available. The City could, if it chose, use its GIS to answer the question on a parcel by parcel basis for every parcel in town, though the sales tax component could not be shared with the public. As of a year ago when I spoke with the CM, the City did not have that capability implemented.
I have been told by someone who has seen the numbers that the downtown is not the primary source of sales tax in town (even if you remove car sales from the comparison) and given that many of the properties downtown have pre-70’s valuations and buildings, I doubt it is the primary generator of property taxes either.
Every City-owned sports facility in town has a usage fee associated. Many of the fields and parks do as well, especially if you want to reserve them for use at a specific time. The users pay extra on top of their normal taxes, just as would be the case with paid parking. I pay more for my kids to have limited access to the City pools during the Summer months than Ron G. likely will pay to park near his preferred coffee spot downtown during the same period. Implementing paid parking during the times when parking is scarce downtown is an example of people ‘pulling their own weight.’
If I was being asked to pay only when parking is scarce downtown I wouldn’t have a problem Mark. 12/7 isn’t scarcity its 8 hours of subsidy and 4 hours of scarcity. Even those four hours aren’t really scarcity they are more like a problem of distribution as even the mayor recognizes. Currently I have no problems finding parking within one block of Mischkas any time before noon. The sad part is that almost all the money goes to the parking meter industry and the benefit to the city is marginal.
This is where we agree, Ron. You should only have to pay when parking is scarce. The demand for paid parking to be cost-neutral is leading to poor choices on how to implement it.
Jason Taormino said “We can also add hundreds of parking spaces, on gravel lots, on the periphery of Davis.”
is this some kind of joke or are you intending this as a serous policy solution to downtown parking issues?
Hi Rik, I’ve spoken with Jason about his idea of peripheral parking lots. What he didn’t include in his post was a shuttle to bring people from those lots into downtown.
I’ve suggested something similar from the neighborhoods, that busses go to downtown, and we use the train depot as a hub, bringing people both downtown and the train depot without bringing cars.
And I, as a huge believer and a professional in public transit, have poo-pooed the idea. Not gonna work in Davis.
Yeah, I agree with Alan. Given the suggestion of “gravel lots”, these would really be on the periphery. Not an attractive or feasible solution at all.
This is not true. The Regal Lot was a gravel lot. We (the early 2000’s parking committee) tried to allow X and public parking here. We found for the lot to be legal, it had to conform to all modern standards of drainage, handicap access, etc. That’s why it took 15 years to find funding and built the thing. What seems such a simple solution was in reality impossible. Should the world be this way? No! But it is.
I keep hearing arguments that X-permits are too expensive or need to be further subsidized.
Am I referencing the wrong information? It looks to be $120/year. How is that considered cost-prohibitive?
https://cityofdavis.org/city-hall/police-department/parking-enforcement/parking-permits
I think it is expensive in the context that the employee could park in downtown for free, so the $120/year is almost entirely a self-inflicted moral cost to the employee.
Basically the city is saying: “If you want to help downtown, please pay $120 to get an X-permit so that you can park further and have to walk further to work. Yes we know that some other employees won’t do that and will still park in downtown to save time and save walking. But you can a better person so you will pay us $120 and inconvenient yourself for a good cause.”
UC Davis does not have this moral / incentive dilemma because by default almost all of the parking is not free.
Also some people who work into the evening don’t want to walk far after they get off work for safety reasons so they move their cars closer in after four. I think this is why the Parking Task Force wanted to change enforcement to 8 PM. This would mean that employees could move closer after six. I imagine that there will be some employees that will pay to park where they work under the 12/7 plan. For those people Davis will be monetizing fear.
To clarify.
My suggestion is that the city accept a one-year reduction in revenues from X permits. That local workers who can prove their employment via a pay stub be given X permits at no cost. This would require them to physically request this by going down to City Hall, which may reduce the numbers as they have to seek the benefit. I further propose that small businesses be allowed to purchase a number of X permits at reduced cost to provide to their employees.
This would have some reduction in income to the city for a period of one year. The point has been made repeatedly that downtown workers are major users of free parking spaces. The suggestion has been made that the businesses have primary responsibility to try to reduce the parking problem, inasmuch as the majority of the downtown business owners object to implementation of paid parking.
This would allow us to determine whether cost is a significant factor, and expansion of X parking usage could alleviate the congestion. The cost to the city is nominal compared to the significant expense of installing meters, which I have seen estimated at about $750,000. Meanwhile, Davis Downtown and individual business owners can promise to work to try to expand usage of the X permits. I don’t know a lot about retail pricing strategies or anything, but I think reducing the cost up front for a fixed period of time is a fairly well-known method of expanding market reach.
It seems that it would be prudent to see if the peak period demand can be reduced, thereby enabling fewer meters to be installed — or perhaps none at all. A year seems to me to be a reasonable time frame to assess this. It’s possible that employees aren’t actually as big a factor in the peak period parking demand as is being assumed.
Parking meters are expensive to install and the decision is nearly irreversible. I’m not sure that there’s any urgency to implementing that particular one of the Parking Task Force recommendations. I don’t see the same urgency being applied to the Task Force recommendation to seek expanded parking. Some business owners see the two as linked.