Downtown Palo Alto drivers, beware!
If you don't mind your colors, the city's new "color-coded" downtown parking system, which takes effect Friday, could cost you a $20 parking ticket.
Seeking to launch the new parking system in a spirit of fun, the city and the Chamber of Commerce are throwing a kickoff party Friday, March 17 (11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., City Hall Plaza). And police acknowledge that there will be "about" a four-week grace period during which violators of the color scheme will be issued warnings and informational brochures rather than $20 tickets.
But don't be fooled. The city is altogether serious about this new plan, which is aimed a sweeping core downtown streets clean of "sleeper" parkers--downtown employees who move their cars several times a day among two-hour spaces to avoid getting a ticket or having to pay for permit parking. Some merchants say the sleepers are hogging the prime parking spaces, making it hard for shoppers to patronize downtown establishments.
Under the new regime, the core downtown area bounded by Alma and Webster streets and Forest and Lytton avenues is divided into four color-coded zones. After a two-hour period in one color zone, a car found in that same zone again before 5 p.m. will be ticketed. Thus, to cover an eight-hour shift, "sleeper" parkers will have to move their cars among at least seven city blocks to avoid tickets.
In the past, we have been skeptical of the color-coded parking program, noting that it is complicated to explain to people and in time will simply shift the parking burden to residential streets near downtown which currently do not have a two-hour limit. Many of the ticketed victims of the color-coded rules, in fact, may end up being shoppers and diners, the very people the system is hoping to encourage. (Will unwitting violators of the new purple, blue, lime and coral scheme be allowed to plead color-blindness?)
But now that this colorful system is the law of the city, we urge people to make a good-faith effort to help it work. The city, downtown merchants and the Chamber of Commerce continue to work diligently to improve the downtown parking situation, and are well aware that the color system is just one of many solutions.
"We hope (the new system) will change the habits of at least 50 percent of the people who park their cars every two hours, but it's not enough," says Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Susan Frank. "We have to change habits and build more parking."
There are many other pieces to this puzzle, including safety measures in existing city garages, improvements in the city's parking permit and carpool programs, encouraging alternative transportation methods and working toward a new downtown parking structure, a feasibility study for which was to be considered this week by the City Council's Policy and Procedures Committee.
Even if the colorful new system improves the parking situation, and we hope that it does, these other elements must not be forgotten.
Back up to the Table of Contents Page