Developers whose buildings will result in 100 or more new car trips during busy commute hours will be required to submit a plan for curbing their tenants’ use of cars under a new rule that the Palo Alto City Council plans to adopt next week.
The requirement is one of several the council will consider Monday night during its revision of the city’s zoning code, an exercise that will also target rules on demolition, loading zones and consolidation of small lots. Unlike the council’s recent debate over the Comprehensive Plan, the city’s broad land-use document, the Monday debate will center on the finer points of the zoning code, which spells out the rules that carry out the Comprehensive Plan goals and policies.
In some cases, the code revisions are minor and are meant to reflect existing practices. In others, including a new rule that will allow apartment complexes to rely on mechanical car lifts in order to satisfy their parking requirements, the city will be venturing into barely charted territory.
The proposal that developers provide “transportation demand management” (TDM) plans falls somewhere in between. While the City Council has been mandating such plans during recent approvals of new developments, including projects at 2515 El Camino Real and 441 Page Mill Road, the action was taken on an ad hoc basis to reassure the buildings’ neighbors that parking would not spill out onto surrounding streets. Developers have also been allowed to propose plans for getting tenants to use transportation other than cars as part of their requests to provide fewer parking spaces.
If the council approves the new proposal, the optional plans would become mandatory. While the zoning code would not specify what needs to be included in the plan, it would direct applicants to a list of suggested guidelines. The list is divided into three levels — light, medium and heavy — and the measures vary based on the project’s proximity to public transit.
Measures for a “light” TDM program include joining Palo Alto’s Transportation Management Association (the new nonprofit charged with shrinking the city’s number of solo drivers), promoting rideshare options and creating a transportation kiosk for the building’s employees. A “moderate” program would include, among other things, an annual transportation fair, carshare membership, on-site shower facilities and transit passes subsidized by at least half.
A “heavy” program would feature measures such as an on-site transportation coordinator, fully subsidized transit passes, commute-planning services for employees, shuttles and e-bike programs.
The new requirement for TDM plans has already been endorsed by the city’s Planning and Transportation Commission and is expected to easily win the council’s approval. Other new provisions could face more resistance.
Chief among them is a new rule that would allow multi-family complexes to use mechanical car lifts to fulfill their parking requirements. The planning commission was split on the issue and ultimately voted 3-2, with Eric Rosenblum and Asher Waldfogel dissenting, to support the change.
Initially, staff had proposed allowing such stacked parking for commercial and mixed-use projects. The city has already approved the lift technology for eight developments, even though the zoning ordinance doesn’t include design standards to the mechanical “stackers.” The idea was to clarify the ordinance by including the technology in the code. As city planning staff note in a new report, mechanical lifts are “becoming more commonplace in urbanized areas and can provide a way to increase parking supplies without devoting more land to surface parking and without the cost of structured parking.”
The planning commission decided to take this a step further and allow residential developments to utilize the technology for guest parking. Former Commissioner Greg Tanaka, who now sits on the council, was the leading proponent of making the change.
“Land value is really expensive in Palo Alto,” Tanaka said at the meeting. “We should maximize the use of our land.”
Others disagreed. Rosenblum noted that many residents will be “rightfully skeptical” that guests would actually use the lifts, as opposed to simply park on the street.
“Part of the parking requirement for residential is to assuage neighbors that you’re not going to create parking problems in the neighborhood,” Rosenblum said.
While most of the proposed changes pertain to new developments, one zoning-code revision takes aim at demolition. If the council approves the change, property owners will not be allowed to demolish homes until they get the city’s approval for a replacement project. Even though it’s not in the current code, such a policy has already been in place for both commercial and residential projects for many years, according to staff. On some occasions, staff wrote, the city has been challenged on this policy. Codifying it, the report states, will eliminate any uncertainty.
The rule aims to ensure that homeowners will not demolish their houses and then leave the site vacant for an extended period of time. The council has been decrying the proliferation of construction site “blight” since at least 2013, when four council members submitted a colleagues memo calling for new regulations on delinquent construction projects in residential zones.
The memo, which was submitted by Councilwoman Karen Holman and former council members Marc Berman, Gail Price and Nancy Shepherd, argued that such projects “detract from neighborhood quality of life, and residents deserve an ordinance that they can rely on to ensure that housing projects start and finish in a reasonable amount of time.”
While most of the new rules pertain to issues and projects throughout the city, one appears to be inspired by a particular development that the council considered and narrowly rejected last June: a proposed Mercedes Benz dealership, which some community members criticized as being too dense to comply with code.
The new provision exempts an automobile dealership’s drop-off areas for cars and queuing aisles for customers from counting towards “gross floor area.”
“While it clearly was arguable that a partially enclosed and covered driveway leading to a customer drop-off area should have counted toward floor area on a previous project, the purpose of this amendment is to clarify whether this area should or should not count as floor area on any pending or future applications,” the report states.
“Given that there are incentives in the code today to encourage automobile dealerships, the unique space requirements for these uses, branding and manufacturing requirements, and the sales tax benefits of auto dealerships to the local economy, staff believes it appropriate to exclude these non-service areas from the floor area calculation.”
they are putting in a garage with lifts under a new development near our home. Just wait to see if it’s actually getting used and how much of a queue there is to use it blocking the residents of a large condo complex who live on that same street. Just wait and see how much of an impact (I bet it will be large) it’ll stir up to an already heavily trafficked area.Don’t approve anymore of these until you see the impact of the first one. This will be the wise thing to do. City Council you are made some very unwise choices lately. Please wait and see and quite ruining our city.
It is absolutely stupid (yes stupid) to insist that developers do this unless the City (or County) can provide better transportation options as alternatives.
The city should be developing parking lots at the freeway ramps with dedicated shuttles to downtown, Cal Ave, Stanford, and anywhere else that generates lots of traffic. VTA is removing service and the present City shuttle routes are not likely to take the riders particularly when there is no charge on shuttles. Any type of slow shuttle that snakes around neighborhoods won’t get people out of cars. Instead we need routes from neighborhood centers that go to Caltrain and other areas such as schools in an efficient and affordable manner.
Saying that people must find alternatives to driving is pointless unless the City provides alternatives for them to use. At present, transportation sucks and it is going to get worse. Bikes and walking may suit some, but there is no alternative to driving for so many people needing to get around either residents or those coming here for work or business.
Stop the stupid suggestions without providing alternatives.
For those who have seen the “car stackers” that are in NYC, these parking structures are open, extremely ugly TALL skeletons that resemble a series of interlocking construction I-beams. What would be the aesthetic and noise requirements for such structures? Most likely, these structures would negatively impact any neighborhood in which they are built.
Tanaka comes up with some crazy ideas.
I agree with “Resident” that Palo Alto should be developing alternative transportation to support its incredible views on how people travel and park. Yet, the surrounding communities near the freeway should neither be considered Palo Alto’s parking lot nor its on-ramp for 101 and the Dumbarton Bridge. Palo Alto and Stanford (or as I call it “The Stanford Land Development Corporation”) need to true up their transit provisions with their development agenda. Adopting Waze to turn more of the surrounding communities into clogged feeder arteries is not improvement.
@bbc: the mechanical stackers in PA developments are underground, not open stackers like in NYC.
It is painful to watch this City struggle to fix a self-inflicted wound. No amount of creative problem solving is going to have a meaningful impact on our parking and circulation problems until we curtail commercial development and stop swelling the job side of the equation. Not forever but long enough to realize some favorable impact from a slow down and to reduce infrastructure shortcomings. Such an approach is long overdue. I’d start with road repair so that traffic can at least flow evenly and safely. Many of our streets are in terrible condition. And 101? There isn’t a good lane.
Sounds like the city can;t figure it out them selves so they put the responsibility on developers. Way to pass the buck PA! Also quit with the re-zoning. PA will never have enough housing and it’s time to stop cramming as many people in as we can. Can you say “balance”.
I will be watching CC in action next Monday. That sounds like a meeting that could stretch into Tuesday morning.
The levels of TDM programs is interesting. The ‘light’ level is a lobbed softball pitch. Easy to hit but it has no real meaning or impact. It sounds so easy to comply with. Developers won’t have a problem with it. The ‘moderate’ level stumps me…annual transportation fair?…on-site shower facilities? What’s that all about? It needs much more explanation. I hope that will be provided at Monday’s meeting. The ‘heavy’ is pretty clear, the toughest and the one there will be the most push-back from developers on.
It sounds like these new requirements will be up to the owner/developer to enforce. Who will check on them? Who on the city staff will be charged with that duty? Let’s not have foxes checking on our chicken coups. That could end up with a lot of dead chickens! lol!
Yes, I too think Tanaka has some very wild and crazy ideas. They sound good and compassionate for those who aren’t residents…can’t afford to buy here, but are not ones that the community at large will accept or that are feasible to implement. It shows some freshman naivete on council. He’ll get his act together, I think, but it will take a couple years on council. He is surrounded by old vets (one really old, but thanks Liz for your many years of service), as well as newbies from recent year elections. He’ll learn from them.
The mechanical lifts for car parking: I ‘googled’ it and watched several videos on how it works. Very clever engineering went into the design of those. Where are they right? Maybe in some new apartment complexes or multi-use projects, but certainly not in residential developments…however they are defined! One of Tanaka’s crazy ideas. It looked like it took a lot longer than for an elevator to come down from a couple floors above. The car owner would have to punch in the location number and wait for a lot of shuffling of cars before his got loaded onto the lift and brought down for him to drive it away.
I think ‘wait’ has it right. Let that project serve as a test case for how it will work out for future projects.
If only we could attribute Tanaka’s ideas to “freshman naivete”. While he is new to CC he is not at all new to Palo Alto politics or being on a Palo Alto dais – he arrived on CC after 6 years on the PTC. That is sufficient time to shed ones naivete. Tanaka’s ideas are what they are and I think it noteworthy that his PTC tenure covered years that propelled us into our present over-built, under-planned situation.
Are the automated parking systems practical – are they actually used or is it just another cynical ploy by the City and staff to enable greater office building density, when in fact the lack of use of the systems means in reality the building is even further under-parked. The City needs to study the actual use of these systems before approving more. In terms of zoning what needs to be done is down-zoning the office densities permitted, dealing
with the cause of our problems not simply futile
attempts at dealing with the effects on the margin
as the problems grow worse and worse and the
City continues its downward spiral.
Right out of the gate, City Council reveals that they have no idea what to do, or even a vague plan to mitigate traffic congestion in Palo Alto. Instead, they toss the problem to developers?! City Council, please explain under what authority or logic should a building owner meddle, coordinate, or interfere with how or when tenants, employees, customers, visitors, delivery services, you name it, get to or from their property? By extension, developers should coordinate those same peoples housing situation to reduce the need to commute all together. Similarly, apartment building owners should vet tenants as to where they work, and real estate agents need to add a ‘I won’t drive in Palo Alto’ clause to purchase contracts. Idiotic, truly idiotic. If this sort of nonsense is how you plan to address Palo Alto’s problems, please call for a special election, resign, and let people with some viable ideas step into your very small shoes.
Mechanical lifts for parking, really City Council? Truly ugly, Put one in each of your front yard, and get back to us how you like it.
Why don’t we study the “stackers” that are already in place before we allow more. In particular, having the entry to a stacker on a busy street like Page Mill sounds like madness. I parked in such an underground two level stacker in Europe and it was quite time consuming. The backup that would result on a busy street as people waited for the car elevator could be horrendous – unless the plan really is for people to park on the street instead.
This is easy to test by studying the usage of existing stackers. What a concept – actually surveying existing situations before making decisions.
Rather than consider ridiculous changes to the zoning rules (who is going to wait around for some mechanical device to deliver a car?) why doesn’t the city council enact some real revisions to the zoning code.
First they should removed all of the exemptions that allow developers and builders to build buildings that are larger than they claim. The measured square footage on the submitted plans rarely matches with the claimed square footage of the building. There are too many ways to make buildings oversized with various exemptions.
Second, they should pass a law that states that no building may use any mechanism to be built bigger than the stated floor area ratio. This includes any density bonuses, any state mandated give-aways of square footage (like the extra floor for housing), etc. This city needs to grow a backbone and fight back against those who seek to overcrowd and destroy the city.
We will continue to suffer loss of quality of life until we elect a city council who will say that we are full and we need to stop stuffing people into this city.
I’ve used mechanical lifts in Europe too, and yes they are so slow, you’ll do anything to avoid them. Every one I saw really required an experienced amployee dedicated to parking the cars. It’s also just dank and icky, and no way would I want to go a few stories down in one of those narrow things in earthquake country (claustrophobia affects a sizable portion of the population). and imagine what happens when they malfunction. Expect them to be underutilized and street parking to be impacted.
Now, if we could only sue developer-bought Councilmembers when their lame excuses to allow more overdevelopment fall through.
If you make an ordinance requiring something, for hwaven’s sake give real teeth to residents to make it so.
I had looked into renting one of the many new apartments on Fremont St in SF. One of the new buildings featured a car stacker in their underground parking garage. The car stacker was an instant deal killer for me. It is extremely slow to use. You have to wait until the machine cycles through the different slots until your car is delivered. Driving into the lift is also an intimidating experience. You have to squeeze your car through a narrow rack and ensure that your wheels are aligned correctly on the lift. The stacker is also very loud. This would be acceptable for people who only use their car every now and then. It’s perfect for people in SF who live and work in the city and use their cars from time to time. However, if you have to use your car everyday this is an awful solution. If Council wants to force PA residents to use stackers then council members should be required to use this at 250 Hamilton. Lead by example.