This is great news!

"While the stakeholder group has reached compromises on key aspects of the program, recent city surveys suggest that the new parking restrictions will also have plenty of detractors. While the survey results are still pending, Sullivan called the levels of support and opposition "very close.""
So the above comments make is sound like either there really is not a problem or people see the RPPP as a draconian solution or people understand the concept of public streets.
Could it be that once again, in palo alto, the squeaky wheel is getting oiled?

Next April! Which year? Market driven, let's see, streets are free all day, garages cost money, IT WORKS!

> 30 streets have been gobbled up ..

Is this thirty streets, or thirty blocks on a lesser number of streets?

It would be best to actually specify the number of blocks, because streets is just too ambiguous a notion to be helpful.

This is a great start! I particularly like the fact that the lower paid employees will be able to benefit from the permits.

@numbers please - I drive downtown almost every week day (dropping off and picking up various people). Anecdotally - if you take the areas from University to maybe Addison and Middlefield to Alma pretty much every non-2 hours spot to park is filled by 10 o'clock. The streets closer to Alma (like Bryant) are totally full of cars from Embarcadero to Palo Alto Avenue. Not only are the streets full, but driveways are blocked too.

Extending the permit parking all the way to Embarcadero is not called for. After Lincoln Ave. there is no problem with on street parking from down town. Please take another accurate poll and you will find this to be the case. Do not penalize the people with paid parking when the issue does not effect them.

The City Council promised implementation in January.
Now it is morphing into "March or April."
The City Manager is continuing his resistance, making sure it wont happen. No surprises here.

> but driveways are blocked too.

The City should have contracted with a company to tow away cars blocking driveways. Tickets costing perhaps $250-$350 should be issued for those cars that could not be towed. The money from the tickets would be used to pay the tow company.

Time to ask the Council Candidates why they have not been interested in solving this problem to date, with forceful means, like towing cars blocking driveways.

The headline is misleading--it makes it sound like the residents of the area are in unison, however it clearly states in the story that city surveys show an almost even split on the RPPP. Also the picture shows 5 cars parked on a portion of a street--not an entire street full of cars, as the caption states.
Biased reporting, anyone?

If the parking garages are so under-utilized, would it be too radical to suggest giving parking tickets to commuters who aren't using the garages we the taxpayers paid for?

Of course limiting more offices would be unthinkable.

Ok, fellow Crescent Park homeowners, let's brace ourselves for all the downtown parkers who will now be parking in front of our houses.

I live on Tasso Street close to the Embarcadero and am not effected by the down town parking problems as many of the folks who live south of Lincoln Ave. can agree with. To levy a parking fee on all these home owners who are not effected is wrong. Do not extend the boundaries all the way to Embarcadero Road. Stop at Lincoln Ave.

regarding "Ok, fellow Crescent Park homeowners, let's brace ourselves for all the downtown parkers who will now be parking in front of our houses."
Yes, there will be a spill-over effect if this is passed. Note, however, that as blocks adjacent to the RPP district become effected, they can petition to be added to the district. So I expect there will be a steady expansion until some sort of equilibrium condition occurs. Also, the spreading out of the parking problem will occur anyway, even if there is no RPP, because of the crazy expansion plans to the downtown offices that are already in the works. (This includes the crowding in of more bodies in dot-com startup sweat shops that are taking over retail space). The real solution, whether or not we have RPP, is (1) robust transprotation demand management; (2) satellite parking arrangements with shuttle buses; (3) crack down on parking exceptions granted to developers; (4) full use of parking garages; (5) new parking garages.

This is a complicated issue and the parking landscape in and around Downtown Palo Alto is less than ideal to start with. But RPP has been proposed 3-4 times previously (1980s, 1990s, 2000 and 2011) and its good to hear that we are close to a potential program this time. RPP is also a important foundation to a lot of the other parking management strategies and programs that council has already reviewed and staff is working to put in place.

I don't live near Middlefield --- but there are already some DTPA workers who park on the other side of Middlefield on streets such as Lytton, Hamilton, Forest, Homer, Channing. And the permit system hasn't been implemented yet!

No doubt that the parking zone will have to be expanded to a distance where it will be terribly inconvenient for the office types to walk to work. I would guess at least to Guinda, if not Seneca.

Bottom line: Residents' permits should be free.

@resident and @nodriveway - from the article "permits should be distributed to residents for free "

Really we're in Associate Professorville. PLEASE do not extend this parking zone out all the way to Embarcadero. We on Tasso near Melville do not need this and have expressed that we do not want it.

A more location-specific polling is in order.

We are really going to take a public resource paid for by all of us taxpayers, and transfer it for exclusive use of a small group of residents for free (for the first car) and $50/YEAR for the next car?? And then, they want the city to spend scarce resources on enforcement??

If the folks that are advocating so strongly for this really cared, shouldn't they be willing to pay SOMETHING? This feels awfully fishy to me.

I live in South Palo Alto. It is not convenient for me to get to University Ave. I am not asking the other residents of Palo Alto to pay for a chauffeur for me to more conveniently get downtown.

Each of our neighborhoods has positives (eg., people in downtown live close to restaurants and parks) and negatives (eg., they might occasionally have to park in their driveways. The horror!).

I live one block south of Lincoln, and there is NO STREET PARKING available during business hours on my block. The permit program absolutely needs to go all the way to Embarcadero. If you are north of Embarcadero, and don't think you have a problem now, just wait until the permit program ends at the end of your street. The article mentions that besides downtown employees, there are Caltrain riders, Stanford students/employees, PA Medical Foundation Employees, and Town & Country employees that exacerbate the situation. There are Paly High students as well. We all need to work on this collectively, so that we solve the problem once and for all, rather than spread it to other neighborhoods.

@Jared Bernstein, @B Kelley - Think about this for a minute - you WANT the RPPP. If you don't take it in your neighborhood, you will become the default spillover area. It may not be a problem for you today, but it will be the day that the RPPP goes into effect in the neighborhoods that do have a problem. Save yourselves the headache, and join the program now.

"Ok, fellow Crescent Park homeowners, let's brace ourselves for all the downtown parkers who will now be parking in front of our houses."

It's not all that bad. And what do you expect: your neighborhood has the word "Park" in its name?

This seems to only hit at one part of the problem. I agree getting to University avenue from more southern parts of Palo Alto requires a car.

Perhaps an expansion of the Palo Alto shuttle is in order? I also am not sure I understand the need for free residential permits. Running the program will be a cost to all of Palo Alto for the benefit of a subset of residents. Also, maybe the fees from the RPP can offset the costs of expanding the Shuttle.

Let me echo this statement ...

> nodriveway
> Bottom line: Residents' permits should be free.

Maybe Palo Alto should have a free yearly sticker for residents that marks them as a resident and they can park within Palo Alto anywhere for free. You would need to go downtown with your registration and pick up a sticker every year for every care registered to a Palo Alto address. Would that work?

Tax the owners of office buildings with inadequate parking.

Also, if Palo Alto keeps building more office space, we will be forced to accept even more high rise, high density housing.

Put the cost on the people who have made a ton of money by creating the problem.

There is no way of knowing from news articles, but one does see a tendency from addresses in the comments that those who oppose a residential permit parking system are those who don't live in the affected area. Note comments such as "I live in an adjacent area and I don't want the spillover." That kind of comment says "I don't care if you have the problem, but I don't want my ox gored." Before I lived in Professorville, I signed a petition about the PAMF expansion although it didn't affect me. It affected the people who lived in the neighborhood and I thought they had the right to complain about PAMF changing the essential character of the neighborhood. Further, people in locations far from downtown have felt the overreaching development. No matter where you live, if the stewards we elected do not protect the citizens of the city, no area is safe if they put the interests of developers that bring in unsafe conditions to our neighborhoods ahead of the neighborhoods. "We either hand together or hang separately."

I'm not a fan of a parking permit program for residents, as I believe you should not have to pay for the right to park in your own neighborhood. I would allow any car registered to a Palo Alto resident to park in those zones without limits, but non-resident vehicles would be subject to time limits. Enforcement could be via license plate scanning, matched against a DMV database. Non-resident vehicles who exceed the limits would receive computer-generated parking tickets. A system like this would be a great convenience to everyone in Palo Alto, especially the residents of neighborhoods next to downtown.

I was very happy to see that you can buy an all day permit from a machine in the Bryant street parking structure ... until I saw the price: $17.50 for one day. This is an outrageous charge and will do nothing to encourage low wage workers find some place to park other than the surrounding neighborhoods. How will the city be able to prioritize low wage workers for eligibility for low cost (if such will exist) parking permits to enable them to park in nearby neighborhoods? Is there a way to reduce charges for parking permits for low wage workers in city parking garages? One way would be making one day parking permits available to eligible workers at a discount.

Parking meters will kill downtown retail. The day Stanford Shopping Center starts charging for parking is the day parking meters makes sense.

Ray, I live in downtown north and I oppose any form of permit parking in neighborhoods, even though my street is heavily impacted. I knew moving into this house that parking would be bad but I accepted it because that comes with living next to a large retail area.

$17.50 is outrageous? For 9 hours of parking (8a-5p)?

That's less than $2/hour.

Before we plead their case, let's define what's a "low wage" worker is. What's the income line, and how many are there really working in downtown Palo Alto? Or is this just one of a number of hypotheses that we don't really have any data to back it?

Pat @ Downtown North,

The amount of development in the last decade in downtown has not been retail space, but office space. The city, by not requiring adequate parking for the office space, has been subsidizing the landlords by making the parking in the neighborhoods the substitute for a landlord building a parking space.

Each parking space is about 200 square feet for a car. Add in additional square footage for the road leading up to the parking space, and we are talking around 300 - 350 square feet per parking space. Instead that 350 square feet is being used a rentable space. Rents in downtown are around $7 per square foot per month. So by being able build rentable office space instead of providing a parking space, the landlord is getting around $500,000 of value added to their property.

As an example, there is a proposal for a new building at 425/429 University. It should have 94 parking spaces, but instead it will have around 30. That 21,000 square feet that should be for parking will become rentable office space - adding around $30 million in value to the property!

I don't think the government should be subsidizing private enterprises through providing public facilities (street parking).

If they're going to make people pay for the permits, they should make the residents pay for the permits too. When you buy a home in a downtown area those are the problems that come with the territory. It's not as if these residents are paying for the paving and curbing of these streets on their own. They're paid for with the tax dollars of everyone. They should not get a free pass to park on the streets if others have to pay.

@Darwin and @Pat Markevitch - The problem with your thought "When you buy a home in a downtown area those are the problems that come with the territory" is that the parking issues extend far beyond just downtown. Professorville and Crescent Park aren't downtown and cars from the offices downtown overflow to those areas.

@free lunch says, "I am not asking the other residents of Palo Alto to pay for a chauffeur for me to more conveniently get downtown."

Other residents already pay for free shuttle service for you. Here's the link to your free shuttle service to downtown: Web Link

Please tell me then when I have a 3 hour meeting in downtown where I should park and how much it will cost?

It seems that since all day at a Caltrain lot is $5, it is best value to park there, pay for parking at the ticket box (and if necessary the lowest fare) and then walk to the meeting on Hamilton.

Now if it costs $5 per day in the Caltrain lot, any higher fee is going to make Caltrain commuters unable to find a parking spot.

Who is using their common sense here?

I think the permits should go to residences and retail employees only, no office workers. These developers continue to build 4 story buildings with office on top which should be two story max and crowd out the downtown. The city charges a hefty fee for parking to these developers but where is the money going- I don't see any new parking structures. The poor retail employees shouldn't have to pay to park. So PA- just keep charging your outrageous parking fees allowing 4 story developments and providing no more parking than whats there now- that's why the residential areas are being over taken.