As Palo Alto looks ahead toward adopting a new long-term vision for transportation, officials are increasingly leaning on a new and yet unproven nonprofit to solve some of the city’s most complex and longest festering traffic problems.
But even as they stressed on Monday night the importance of supporting the city’s newly established Transportation Management Association (TMA), it remained unclear where the nearly $2.5 million in needed funding for the new group will come from. That is the amount that it would take to reduce the number of workers driving solo to downtown Palo Alto by 30 percent over three years, according to the organization’s new business plan.
The updated business plan, which was released earlier this month, offers two options for achieving the council-mandated 30 percent reduction (the rate translates to about 1,650 downtown commuters). While the three-year plan carries an estimated price tag of $2.5 million, achieving the goal over a five-year period would cost about $3.5 million.
Both plans show the costs gradually increasing every year, with the city expected to cover some share of the budget and local businesses paying for another portion. The three-year plan indicates that the costs of reducing the single-occupancy-vehicle rate would be about $120,000 in the first year, $1.1 million in the second year and $1.3 million in the third year. This would lead to a 3 percent reduction in the single-occupancy-vehicle rate in the first year, a 15 percent reduction in the second year and a 30 percent reduction in the third.
Under the five-year plan, costs would climb gradually every year, from $120,000 in the first year to $1.4 million in the fifth.
The goal of the city and the new TMA is simple yet daunting: fewer car trips. But as the council discussed the city’s new Transportation Element on Monday night, council members generally agreed that reducing vehicle trips is one of the city’s most important long-term objectives.
To address this problem, the TMA’s plans rely heavily on transit passes, including discounted tickets to Caltrain, VTA buses, Samtrans and Dumbarton Express. The business plan has a goal of shifting between 700 and 1,000 commuters (out of downtown’s estimated 5,500 commuters).
Carpool subsidies is another tool, which is expected to shift the behavior of between 300 and 600 employees. The effort took off earlier this year, when the city signed an agreement with the carpooling app, Scoop.
The remaining workers would be shifted from cars to other modes of transportation through a combination of “last-mile” solutions, possibly by introducing a “Lyft Line” service for employees who need help getting home from their nearby Caltrain station; an expansion of the city’s shuttle program; and services targeting workers in the hospitality industry who have to work in the off-peak hours. This could involve an agreement with a rideshare company or a special “pilot” shuttle that would operate in the off-hours.
The city’s new Transportation Element, which the council discussed but did not vote on, acknowledges the TMA (and others like it) with a new policy, which calls for the city to “support the establishment and operation of Transportation Management Associations to address transportation and parking issues such as appropriate in the City’s employment districts.”
It also includes a policy calling for the city to work with the downtown TMA and with Stanford University to “aggregate data and realize measurable reductions in single-occupancy vehicle commuting into and from Downtown and in the Stanford Research Park.”
Several council members argued for an even stronger emphasis on the TMA in the new document, which governs the city’s vision for transportation until 2030.
Councilman Cory Wolbach said the downtown TMA, along with a transportation-working group in Stanford Research Park (a collaborative of large companies working together on shuttle systems and other traffic-reducing measures), should be called out more explicitly in the document.
“I think that’s a major shift we’ve been moving toward in the last couple of years and I’d like to see that with an even greater emphasis,” Wolbach said.
Vice Mayor Greg Scharff made the case for establishing other transportation-management nonprofits in the city, specifically around California Avenue. Exploring a California Avenue TMA should be an explicit goal in the document, he said.
Councilwoman Karen Holman made a case for exploring a “no-net new trips” goal, while Mayor Pat Burt took it a step further and said the city needs to work for a reduction of trips (Holman later also embraced the reduction goal).
Yet Burt also acknowledged that the council will have to figure out a way to actually implement the policies that will meet these goals.
“A bunch of whims and wishes without funding really don’t get us anywhere,” Burt said. “We’ve got to have a way to implement this.”
Others shared his view. Toward the end of the meeting, Councilwoman Liz Kniss made the case for funding the TMA, saying the organization needs to be “kept alive.”
“It will make a big difference in the long term,” she said. “It needs our help and it needs to survive.”
Even so, it wasn’t clear Monday where the subsidies will come from. The TMA’s business plan lists parking revenues as one possible option. The city is now undertaking a parking study that will evaluate the prospect of introducing paid parking to downtown garages. The collected revenues, as well as funding from existing parking permits, could potentially be used to fund the TMA, according to the business plan.
Other possible revenue sources listed in the organization’s budget include grants from the city, the county and transportation agencies, service contracts, private donations and assessments to downtown employers.
Over develop then tax the residents to put a band aid on the problem! Real planning would restrict commercial growth, tax under parked commercial developments, and make businesses pay for the subsidies for their employees. As long as our leaders give benefits to developers using tax dollars, we will always have a worsening problem
Once again, the CC is looking at traffic issues as a Palo Alto problem rather than a regional problem.
Nowhere do I see anyone commenting on joining forces with Mountain View, Menlo, RWC, Sunnyvale, etc. to do a combined traffic policy solution discussion. We are not an island. Just as many people are leaving town each day as are arriving (just a guesstimate). Caltrain and highway onramps are busy for reverse commutes if there is even such a thing as a reverse commute in town. Residents are working in our neighboring cities and will continue to be doing so.
Secondly, nowhere do I see how CC are putting any pressures on VTA to improve transportation in town. We all know that VTA wants to reduce bus services in Palo Alto and concentrate on SJ BART. CC should let us know how they are protesting cuts to our bus routes and what they plan to do about this reduction in service.
Last comment has to be about school traffic. We know that during the summer and other times when there is no PAUSD school, our traffic is much better. Parents driving to and from all our schools is a great traffic problem as well as parking at many of the schools spreading out into neighborhood streets. There is no mention of what CC is planning to do to help the school commute.
I think it extremely worrisome that these 3 issues have not been addressed either in the article or by CC or even candidates for CC. As far as I am concerned, this should be the biggest election issue and for some reason it is not.
Traffic and parking concerns have to be looked at from a regional point of view. We do not have a Berlin Wall around us and we are not an island. If we don’t talk to our neighbors and they don’t talk to us then we are not helping a situation. If getting to a job in Sunnyvale or RWC has no other transportation than Caltrain, then first mile/last mile scenarios have to be dealt with both ends for them as well as those who arrive to work here.
This is all well and good but our transportation/traffic/parking issues absolutely need a regional solution. Palo Alto working on car sharing will have little to no effect. If there are fewer cars on University and Embarcadero, how long do you think it will take Menlo Park and Mountain View commuters to figure out that PA is the faster route and subsequently clog our roads getting to their jobs in those cities via El Camino?
High speed rail will cost $200B and allow us to get to LA in three hours instead of one. That was clearly a mistake. Imagine what we could do with splitting that amount between LA and the Bay Area – $100B = many more BART routes, including connecting SJ to Milbrae; faster, more efficient trains and busses; etc, etc.
Focusing on individual cities along the Peninsula will never work. We need a regional solution to this regional problem. In the meantime the population, and therefore the problem, will continue to grow. Car sharing and anti-development = same head-in-the-sand policies that are now so popular…and ineffective.
Council did not dig into real issues. For example, when would funds actually flow into the start-up non-profit organization? Cash flow such as vague, new parking fees wont be adopted anytime in near future; and, if so, there is major competition for new cash flow.
Does the current TMA Board (appointed on political basis) have the skill sets to manage very challenging start-up? The TMA Board must have new members with proven start-up Board experience. Transportation knowledge is not necessary; hard business skills are needed.
It is my opinion, based on informal consultation with outside experts and direct observation of the TMA Board, that University Avenue commercial district is fundamentally too small to warrant major investment by city and private parties. I am not transportation expert; value of my opinion is essentially zero. It is time to call in outside consultant for expert opinion…not later that the first Council meeting in January.
TMA is an essential organizations to address obvious transportation voids. Stanford University and Stanford Research Park know what to do for their long-term needs. The rest of Palo Alto citizens, businesses and employees need a TMA, too.
Bottom line: This TMA without definite, long-term funding and leadership is recipe for kicking the can down the road.
Public transit and carpooling is generally done by people who lack cars.
People will always drive if they have the option. It saves so much personal time.
This article even states that there is NO PROOF that TMA strategies will “change people’s behavior” yet they irresponsibly throw millions at it.
City Council members ought to change THEIR behavior.
Sorry not to see any emphasis on safe and improved bicycle infrastructure. Bryant St takes many students out of cars (and it’s healthy!) but in many other areas people feel too unsafe to get out of their cars. Traffic soars during the school year, slows down during summer.
Let’s give 2.5 million tax payer dollars to a “new and unproven non-profit” to solve the problem. Well that makes a lot of sense! It’s how City Council rolls.
How many paid employees work for TMI? How is their payroll funded? What is their budget? Can they reveal it? I would hope so as a non-profit! I was the Trustees’ Chair at our local church so I know a lot about 501.C3’s.
“To address this problem, the TMA’s plans to rely heavily on transit passes, including discounted tickets to Caltrain, VTA buses, Samtrans and Dumbarton Express. The business plan has a goal of shifting between 700 and 1,000 commuters (out of downtown’s estimated 5,500 commuters)”.
Is that all the $2.5 million would be used for, or for paying their staff as well? Do they have any money now that’s available to start implementing these ideas? Can they do it without CC’s approval? I think some companies are already offering passes to their employees. Any data available on which companies and how many employees are taking advantage of it?
“Carpool subsidies is another tool, which is expected to shift the behavior of between 300 and 600 employees. The effort took off earlier this year, when the city signed an agreement with the carpooling app, Scoop.”
So what’s the scoop on Scoop? How is it working out? Numbers please.
“Even so, it wasn’t clear Monday where the subsidies will come from. The TMA’s business plan lists parking revenues as one possible option. The city is now undertaking a parking study that will evaluate the prospect of introducing paid parking to downtown garages. The collected revenues, as well as funding from existing parking permits, could potentially be used to fund the TMA, according to the business plan.”
So what is the projected income from those suggested revenue sources? And I hate that word ‘potentially’. It just sounds…well… so potential. lol!
“Other possible revenue sources listed in the organization’s budget include grants from the city, the county and transportation agencies, service contracts, private donations and assessments to downtown employers”.
Good luck on all of those, and especially the assessment idea on our main downtown player/employer, Palintir. They have been the main cause of our current problem. Maybe they’ve offered support on how they will help out that I’m not aware of. I would be anxious to hear about it if they have. I see so many candidates, PAFers, that support their position and want to protect them. Big companies, with no interest in the quality of life PA’s residents have enjoyed for years, shouldn’t be protected. Forget about all that tax revenue to support our budget. Let’s tighten our belts, trim things…just like shrubs and trees…and let’s move on. The city budget is overgrown as it is.
Yay! City Manager can hire PAForward “experts” and reward them for supporting his pro-development stance.
The CM will not do anything to inconvenience, or ask for money from businesses or developers, not if he can help it. So use taxpayer’s money. Right.
Re: “introducing paid parking to downtown garages.” One more way to charge residents for a problem they didn’t create. One less reason to ever visit downtown.
What are the commuting characteristics of the city employees? Palo Alto is one of the largest employers in downtown. They could tomorrow start charging employees for parking and soften the blow by increasing salaries to cover the parking (set amount – no %). It would be revenue neutral until people stopped driving. Are they giving out free transit passes today? They should be. Clean up your own house first.
As far as I know, the city has steadfastly refused to charge employees for parking saying it is too hard to find employees if you don’t provide parking. This would be easy to implement. How much would it really cost as they would only have an expense if employees did stop driving cars.
Not only are city employees and city cars taking up most of a city garage, the TMA expects us us to pay for city employees’ car commuting to the tune of $2 a day, $1 for each leg of their commute. And for their budget.
Plus we’re paying for all the commuters who daily undermine our quality of life. And we equip them with free chargers for their e-cars. And then we pay them to tell us to stop driving. And we pay for all the poorly scheduled empty shuttles that don’t take kids to/from school to keep their parents off the street.
How about the city employees start practicing what they preach, start taking public transportation and/or biking to work. What hypocrites.
Why do we tax payers have to bail out the city ( or county, state, or nation) for THEIR screw-ups??
THEY got us into this mess, THEY should figure a way out of this without more cost to US!
To all you geniuses, tech workers…surely you can develop algorithms or programs to help solve the problem. How about only taxing the employers and their employees who call PA their home? Leave out residents and folks coming here to shop, eat in our restaurants, visit our salons and what’s left of our retail, etc. C’mon, if you’re so adept at spying on others, how about spying on us and providing good information that will help our planners and CC members in making their future decisions.
The solution is right in front of their eyes. Do like Stanford：Charge a lot for parking. This will reduce the number of people driving and will provide resources for a shuttle system like Marguerite. ，The transit or parking subsidies should be paid for by the employers.
Please do not rely on half-baked ideas when the solutions from other area are obvious.
Palantir is not the cause of the problem. More of its employees use alernative methods on average than any other major employer.
We can rely on many posters here to spread fear and misingormation.
@Chris
But we don’t want to stop driving, we want the other guy to!
How about below grade crossings at East Meadow and Charleston.
How about making Embarcadeo / El Camino and University / El Camino crossings a bit more efficient (who ever designed the light system at Town and Country, must never shop there)
Between Woodside Road and San Antonio, the paths between 101, El Camino, and 280 (with the exception of Oregon/Page Mill) are not good.
And with more high density housing and business being built, it’s only going to get worse.
Traffic jams exist because of overpopulation and excessive commercial development by both Palo Alto and Stanford. It sounds simplistic and not sexy, yet these are the two reasons traffic is so bad. All the solutions for mitigating this problem are discussed, accept those that will actually mitigate the problem-population reduction through the creation of many high tech hubs away from the Bay area, and a stop to commercial development. What we hear are crazy ideas like under-parked micro units all over the place, which would amount to treating a burn victim with boiling water.
Unless you live on the Caltrain corridor, taking public transportation takes often twice as long as driving. As a region, public transportation needs to take people quickly and at less cost from where they live to where they actually NEED to go, WHEN they need to be there. Until we have the public transportation infrastructure of an actual City, stop adding jobs. People do NOT work where they live, in 20 years in Palo Alto they only people I know who have consistently lived and worked here either own their own businesses, work for Stanford or PAMF. Everyone else commutes to a variety of places from San Francisco to San Jose to Fremont, and most changes John bs every couple of years.
TMA is more bureaucracy and money down the drain. Let’s spend all resources on real, lasting improvements.
Yes, charge everyone more for parking (anyone parking on public streets or lots)…and use the funding to improve our roads and public transport.
This will work. Everything else might slow the growth of the problem, but not fix it.
People are furious with the city for allowing the growth and traffic to become unbearable for people who LIVE HERE and PAY TAXES for city services.
I am voting for Arthur Keller and Lydia Kou and I urge you be wary of others who are idealistic proponents of unproven “solutions”. Both Arthur Keller and Lydia Kou have track records of excellent public service. They deserve your support.
Totally agree with what Cheryl said above about Lydia Kuo and Arthur Keller.
Their responses to questions and complaints are relevant and responsive, unlike other candidates.
I’m still fuming about a letter sent a few weeks ago to one of the candidates about the totally unnecessary traffic backups on Middlefield caused by the mess at Jordan and our transportation folks putting giant Botts Dots at other Middlefield intersections which also prevent cars from going around signalling to turn.
To make a long and frustrating story short about trying to get a sensible response from a candidate for city council who’s on the Planning & Transportation Committee. After 4 disconnects where he got the times of day of the problem wrong, then the month of a meeting scheduled to deal with it wrong, then promises to respond that we never answered. FEH.
When you write to Kuo and Keller, you get sensible and well-considered responses, not vague platitudes that are both erroneous and totally irrelevant.
@Chris
Good post and ideas, but please share with us how many of Palintir’s employees use alternative modes of transportation. Numbers please, not %ages. Ah, but what is that in terms of % of their workers? City planners and CC members need much more data before they make some important decisions.
Charging employees to park will result in them looking to park in residential areas rather than pay the fee. Stanford is a prime example. Their employees are filling El Camino, Park Blvd. and the residential streets in Evergreen and Southgate.
So taxpayers will be funding an ever wider RPPP,
What’s a car?
It’s hard to believe that even in the unlikely event that a nonprofit can come up with sensible solutions to address the growing traffic problems in Palo Alto that the situation actually will improve when the chief transportation bureaucrats are working hard to subvert and hinder the movement of automobiles throughout the city.
A case in point is the new Middlefield Road configuration between Embarcadero and Oregon Expressway. I have been travelling this road for 30+ years and never has it been more difficult and time consuming to negotiate. By making it impossible to get around left turning vehicles, traffic halts regularly. It takes at much longer to get through this stretch than it used to. When you multiply the increased travel time and greater time spend idling waiting for left turners by the number of cars that use this road it’s clear that there is substantial economic loss and greater output of greenhouse CO2 because of this change in the roadway.
To my knowledge there was no safety reason for this change (contrary to the assertions of the ideologues at city hall). There was no spate of car/car or car/bike accidents that occasioned this. It was some airy philosophical nonsense that motivated this change and we are collectively worse off for it.
Count on more of this craziness and more time getting anywhere in your car as long as the city employs people who are more interested in pushing an agenda than in solving traffic problems.
Mary is absolutely right about how much worse the Middlefield between Oregon and Embarcadero has gotten.
The Jordan mess is dumb but adding giant Bott’s Dots at 4 other Middlefield intersections to prevent going around turning traffic on that WHOLE stretch adds insult to injury. WHY??
It totally ignores all the input from residents a year ago AND makes things even worse for us. Maybe it’s revenge for how roundly we rejected the last “improvement” plan. Whatever.
Try demanding answers from Mr. Fine, head of the Planning and Transportation Commission, and Mr. Mello and see how far you get. The only “concrete” responses I got were a) the wrong date for a meeting on the problem and b) the vague promise that Mr. Mello will START discussions with the county on changing the OREGON lights to compensate for the problems Palo Alto created on Middlefield.
Do they know/care that Oregon’s ALREADY gridlocked? Ask what they hope to accomplish and you get total silence. Do they know know/care that “discussions” with the county on fixing the El Camino /Embarcadero lights have been going on for 10 years to no avail. But hey, we’re getting bright green Dutch bike sidewalks. Wowie-zowie.
Pay attention to the TMA. We’re being asked to PAY carpooling commuters $2 a day every workday ($680 a year pp)) to commute and bear the FULL cost of public transit. Companies, on the other hand, would be asked to pay a measly $50 or $100 per employee IF enacted.
Maybe the city — our new financial partner — just wants to frustrate us into leaving so they can get their percentage-based “document transfer fee” when we sell because we all know it takes 5 times as much effort to process the fee on a $5 million sale as on a $1 million.
Enough with density, under-parked buildings, traffic “diets” and illogical rhetoric.
PS: I’d like to know who’s funding the incredibly biased telephone survey that claims “residentialists” want to take Palo Alto back to the 1950s, oppose all jobs, etc.
To put a positive spin on it… I actually hope their strategies succeed. Maybe motorists will have a moral awakening and start ride sharing and cramming into buses and shuttles like lemmings and ants… the great Socialist awakening… we must shed our personal efficiency and independence in favor of the Greater Good… so I hope it works, I hope they get cars off the road and then I’ll have the road all to myself… because I guess I’m a morally corrupt, helpless deplorable who likes to drive his car alone.
They are trying to mimic Denmark…. Instead we will become more like China
“PS: I’d like to know who’s funding the incredibly biased telephone survey that claims “residentialists” want to take Palo Alto back to the 1950s, oppose all jobs, etc.”
Mmm.. Let’s see. Have you heard of a downtown based start up whose names starts with a P, which in turns financially backs and works closely with a small group that lobbies incessantly for limitless growth and density, whose name starts with a P too?
@Resident of Midtown
“People will always drive if they have the option. It saves so much personal time.
This article even states that there is NO PROOF that TMA strategies will “change people’s behavior” yet they irresponsibly throw millions at it.”
No, you are wrong, and I am living proof. I bike to work. I don’t own a car, and I have no plans to get one.
But when my brothers went away for months, they asked me to take care of their cars. So, I have a car, I might as well use it, right? Wrong. My neighborhood has been packed and stacked without a development plan, because devotion to the façade of “neighborhood character” trumps economic realities, so we have lots of inlaws and rented rooms and far more working adults than parking spots. Because I work pretty late, I found that I would be searching for parking for up to an hour when I got home. This made parking extremely expensive for me, and I tried not to do it. I would just find a nice spot, and then leave the car there until street cleaning forced me to move it.
Thus, I discovered that transportation demand management works, even when it isn’t actually planned. We just haven’t proven deliberate TDM.
PS: I’d like to know who’s funding the incredibly biased telephone survey that claims “residentialists” want to take Palo Alto back to the 1950s, oppose all jobs, etc.
There were 2 separate surveys with very biased questions by
California Opinion Surveys and by
Precision Research
The COP had a specific question on whether I would vote for Kniss.
I don’t think there was much doubt about who was funding them. The big money candidates.