One of my first jobs, in 2004, was counting the number of cars parked on every downtown Palo Alto block from 4 to 11 a.m. Rising before 4, I prowled downtown’s streets, taking note of how the number of parked cars changed by the hour and building the data to stand up Palo Alto’s eventual residential permit program downtown.
One thing was clear: As soon as businesses started to open, their employees were filling up our streets with cars.
Many things have changed since that summer we can now summon a cheap, safe ride from the palm of our hand but grinding traffic and lack of parking have not. That pair of frustrations is still a constant topic of conversation. It’s led to screaming matches, apartment downsizing, limits on new office space and many late nights in the City Council Chambers.
That anger is well-placed and well-meaning. Having grown up in Palo Alto, there’s no doubt that traffic is far worse today than it was even a decade or two ago, and it cuts deeply into our quality of life. It wastes valuable time and pollutes the air. Even my own parents moved out of Palo Alto recently, with traffic near the top of their list of frustrations.
Few problems, aside from affordability, seem more intractable.
Government solutions have focused on stopping the influx of new residents and workers through limits on new construction and time limits on parking. That has pushed residential and commercial rents higher, and made life harder for downtown visitors and residents, some of whom now park nearly a mile from their office so they can keep driving to work. Aside from Caltrain’s Baby Bullet service, better public transit options haven’t produced many solid results, and the Palo Alto Shuttle is rarely occupied.
According to the Palo Alto Weekly’s recent cover story on traffic, some very fed-up residents are even trying to take control of the epidemic themselves, recording videos, putting cones in front of their homes or standing on street corners to guard against illegal turns.
After decades of minimal impact, it’s time to try a different path to reduced traffic.
The city should require businesses and multi-story apartment buildings to subsidize alternative transportation. Specifically, businesses and large apartment buildings should pay into a fund a transportation-demand management organization that then comes up with creative ways to subsidize transportation methods other than driving solo.
The council proposed something like this (a “head tax”) last year and then shelved it until this year largely because council members didn’t know what to do with the money. With the new year upon us, let’s revisit the plan and pair it with higher charges on parking-garage permits.
Charging a head tax on businesses with more than 10 employees and increasing parking-garage rates could raise millions per year.
That money could then be pooled (and potentially matched by the city two or three times over) and turned into large discount programs on alternative transportation platforms like Lyft, Uber, Scoop or other ride-hailing and transportation platforms. Usage could be limited only to those going to and from Palo Alto’s business districts, and only during peak hours.
With door-to-door pickup and no looking for parking on arrival, it’s already more convenient to hail a ride than drive solo. For the people who live or work in Palo Alto, we just need to make ride-sharing and other new options cost-competitive with driving alone to truly make a dent in habits.
As usage starts to pick up from employees who can start to commute from San Jose, Mountain View and other places for just a couple of dollars (of their own money) per day, prices will drop as ride-sharing services are better able to pair commuters together, getting three or even four commuters in a single car. This is exactly what’s happened in San Francisco with Lyft Line and Uber Pool prices have dropped drastically over time, as match rates and carpooling rates have skyrocketed.
Better yet, Palo Alto has already created the organization to manage this program: Palo Alto’s new transportation-demand management (TDM) organization. It is tasked with reducing solo-occupancy driving in Palo Alto, and this program would be the perfect way to give it the funds to actually tackle that goal.
So long as local residents and office workers have little incentive to change their behavior, they won’t. But give people a nudge, and habits will change.
Even businesses and residential developers will love the idea, as the city could make new development easier in return (of course, asking for contributions to the TDM from those developers). Employers want to solve this problem, and they want to grow and stay in Palo Alto, but it’s very hard for a single employer to solve this problem alone. It’s the ultimate tragedy of the commons, and something really fixed only with some government-enforced carrots and sticks.
I’ll bet most developers will be happy to chip in significant money to the TDM, too, if it means fewer protests to their plans and faster city approvals.
It would be a much better use of money than pumping millions of valuable tax dollars into new parking garages or mostly empty shuttles. It could be the way we can finally get people out of their cars.
We’ve spent enough time yelling at each other, in our cars and at council meetings. Let’s show that Palo Alto can take the lead again on tough issues and finally make a dent in America’s most intractable, frustrating problem.
Former City of Palo Alto intern and transportation consultant Evan Goldin is a Palo Alto native and current resident. You can email him at evan.goldin@gmail.com.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to have single-family homes subsidize transit, since low density is what forces commutes from outside our community into our community? Make room for those commuters to be locals with higher-density housing.
This observation has been made before, but it’s worthwhile to keep it in mind.
Ride services actually increase traffic compared to driver-owned vehicles. Why? Consider Alice, who wants to get from point A to point B, and Charlie, who wants to get from point C to point D. If both own cars, they take one trip from A to B and one trip from C to D. If both use a ride service, the ride service car goes from A to B, then B to C, then C to D. That section from B to C is added traffic.
To reduce traffic, you need to put multiple people in a single vehicle going from a cluster of nearby sources to a cluster of nearby destinations at about the same time. If a big fraction of transportation demand fits that pattern, there are multiple ways you can go about serving it (ride service pools being one example). If it doesn’t, you have a larger problem; ride services by themselves won’t help much.
@Cynthia – homeowners already subsidizes transit through their county property tax, but homeowners are not getting their fair share of benefits because transit in the city does not serve most residential areas.
Personally, I would rather see this new business tax be used to beef up the city’s shuttle bus system which is currently way to sparse to be useful to most people. However, I’m would like to see more details on how a subsidized taxi system would work. I do hope there is some way to restrict the cars from roaming the streets looking for fares, which is causing a lot of extra traffic in some cities.
How about a shuttle down El Camino that comes every 10 minutes or so, I’ll bet if we had that at least people wouldn’t complain about parking…
Would love to see the same amount of attention given to English and writing! PAUSD students enter and leave middle school with little or no knowledge of grammar, how to spelll, how write a complete sentence etc.
Before we can address the excessive traffic in Palo Alto streets and discuss effective solution options, we have to admit the truth about the cause of the problem.
Using traffic problem as an excuse to limit housing development even more could not have been more hypocritical of Palo Alto home owners and the city administration.
Traffic is directly created by greedy Palo Alto homeowners who control the city council by blocking housing developments in order to prop up their homes’ value and in return forcing thousands of people to commute into Palo Alto.
Palo Alto has a very distortedly high ratio of businesses to housing. The only solution is to fix the ratio by either decreasing business zoning or increasing the housing stock. In the former case, less businesses create less traffic into Palo Alto and in the latter employees can live close. In either case house prices would come down to achieve significantly reduced traffic. Higher population density would in the long term also allow development of financially feasible mass transit, whether it is light rail or BART extension. If protecting suburbian feeling is essential to residents, then they have to reduce the number of businesses in the city.
However, greedy home owners with disproportionate influence over the city council, as opposed to renters who do not, will continue to increase commercial density and reduce or maintain the already very low housing density in order to craft an artificial, misguided, and counterproductive effect to skyrocket their homes’ values. The traffic problem is unsolvable with the current greedy intentions of Palo Alto home owners.
Unless they admit the truth that they have been causing the traffic problem by skewing the business to housing ratio, they will never solve it.
@Steve J. Trent: Your characterization of Palo Alto homeowners as greedy is insulting and inaccurate. I think I speak for many Palo Alto homeowners and residents who would gladly give up higher home prices for a return to the high quality of life we used to enjoy here. And, having a lot of home equity doesn’t help much if you want to sell to escape the new problems of traffic, noise and crime that the recent boom has brought, because you surrender the low property tax basis that allows you to live here, and pay a large capital gains tax on the profit. That means you cannot stay in the Bay Area and enjoy the same level of housing that you originally bought. Also, the residentialist slate did not win the City Council election this time, the pro developement Chamber of Commerce slate won, so you are out of touch with respect to current realities. You have joined the San Jose Mercury columnist Scott Herhold in painting all Palo Alto homeowners as greedy land barons. Not accurate and not nice.
I rarely go into PA any more, because parking is difficult to find. That reduces traffic, to be sure, but it also deprives businesses there of my business. I have many choices where to take my business, and the inadequate parking downtown is more than sufficient disincentive for me to choose PA. None of the solutions proposed above would solve the issue. The times I would go to PA, I would usually be with other people, either family or clients. We wouldn’t want to wait for a ride share, an ECR shuttle, or anything of the kind. May I say I also don’t think it’s fair to employees to force them to park far from work. They have jobs, families to feed, etc., and their time is valuable, too. If you don’t want downtown PA to have any businesses left, fine, then keep on doing what you are doing. The businesses that remain will make less money, and will tend to move elsewhere over time. Businesses considering downtown PA to open a place of business will tend to select other locations.
If you want to attract people to businesses downtown, or at least not lose existing business, then the only solution that would work is to provide more parking. Seems rather obvious, doesn’t it? Build multi-level garages, or more underground garages. I am sure there are competing considerations, in that some people don’t really care if downtown attracts business, or prefer that businesses downtown move elsewhere. That’s the choice PA will have to make.
I noticed on my last trip to downtown PA, which must be a year ago now or longer, that the underground lot on Hamilton had dedicated more spaces to city council members, who must use them only rarely, and that the number of open slots for people who wanted to visit downtown restaurants or other businesses had been reduced. Personally I think it would be better if city council members and any other government officials had to face the same problems that other people trying to park have. They might then have a different view of the problem. In any event, that was the last straw for me, and I haven’t been back. I don’t mind paying a reasonable amount for parking downtown. The problem is the unavailability of parking at all, or spending an inordinate amount of time finding it, or being pushed to the margins of downtown or beyond to find parking (this last must annoy local residents even more than downtown parking would bother them).
@Michael – I used to visit downtown Mountain View all the time. Rarely go anymore because traffic and parking are so difficult. Palo Alto and Mountain View are essentially the same in this regard and I suggest that the 2 cities team up on the solution. How about a shuttle system that serves both cities? How about better bicycle routes between the 2 cities, including between Palo Alto and the Google area north of Hwy 101.
“Charging a head tax on businesses with more than 10 employees and increasing parking-garage rates could raise millions per year.”
WHY?
Why not work within our existing city (or regional, county, state) budgets?
Where is the supposed answer always a new bureaucratic answer – requiring staff, a new scheme, a new fee/tax?
I suggest re-allocating existing monies within this state/county/region/city to pay for this, if deemed appropriate.
The VTA 22 bus runs on El Camino Real every 12 minutes all day long. VTA line 22 runs every 15 minutes making limited stops at Downtown Palo Alto, California Avenue, and Arastradero/Charleston. It would be nice if the 522 has some dedicated lanes to make it more reliable, faster, and attractive but that idea was torn to shreds a few years ago.
I wonder if the person who counted all the cars parked on the streets also counted the empty spaces in the downtown garages?
I think the idea of using Uber, etc. is not going to solve any type of traffic problem as whether the car is private or is an Uber driver and passenger, it is still a car on the road and after the drop off is likely to once again be a solo driver going to his next pickup.
I have never used a shuttle because the shuttles do not go where I want to go at the times I want to get there. I don’t mind a short walk either end, but I do object to having to arrive an hour before an appointment and not being able to get a shuttle an hour after my appointment ends. The shuttles are not well designed to be good alternatives to busy people. They don’t even do a good job of jetting our school children to school.
Getting all the parking spots in our garages well used could be done with efficient payment procedures for over 3 hour parking. We need technology to help us find the empty spots and either machines on every level or apps to pay by phone. An occasional parker arriving in downtown Palo Alto has no idea how to pay for parking in a garage or lot so ends up having to look for street parking a fair walk away because it is such a complicated process in trying to pay for over 3 hours.
We also need to have 30 minute parking outside retail to enable simple errands being part of a longer trip to various destinations.
We need to get parking lots near the offramps of 101 and 280 and take drivers in dedicated shuttles to the downtown, Cal Ave, Stanford and other business areas. These need to be dedicated shuttles to one destination that are frequent and do not snake around neighborhoods. The shuttles would have to be cheaper than the cost of parking to make it worthwhile.
People will get out of their cars when they have efficient, affordable alternatives. Believe me, if I had to go go to downtown and could depend on a frequent, reliable shuttle getting me there without the hassle of looking for a parking spot at the end, I would be delighted. I would even pay a couple of dollars for the privilege of using it. Unfortunately, we do not have that type of efficiency in our city traffic management.
yes. lets push the problem onto “gig” workers who have no rights, no benefits and take on all of the liabilities that should be shouldered by the business owners…those people driving to crummy jobs serving the wealthy downtown palo alto live miles away…shuttle services aren’t going to cut it.
Anne– how about the fact that Palo Alto homeowners regularly vilify developers and companies like Palantir? Is that insulting and inaccurate?
Wouldn’t traffic quadruple if our 2-hour spots turned into 30-minute spots?
> homeowners already subsidizes transit through their county property tax
Actually, everyone funds the transportation districts from our substantial sales taxes.
For a nickel a day, the city could buy every resident an annual VTA Eco-Pass.
Musical
Where did anyone suggest turning 2 hour spots into 30 minute spots?
I think both have their place, but 30 minutes outside retail makes sense to me and 2 hours in lots and garages could still serve those who want to eat as well as/or run several errands.
Q1.) What is “apartment downsizing”? Please explain.
Q2.) Can you name under parked apartment buildings? Please be specific. Example:
Apartment complex A has X parking spots, but should have Y parking spots.
Q3.) You claim, “the Palo Alto Shuttle is rarely occupied.” Can you cite numbers or a recent study?
I see the shuttle neat be packed with students on their way to school. I can only assume that they take the shuttle home too.
I see the shuttle NEAR ME packed with students on their way to school. I can only assume that they take the shuttle home too.
—-sorry for the typos
Thinking back on this, I’m not sure my reasoning was logical.
Clearly, not everyone can benefit from a VTA pass. Not everyone lives and works in the same town, nor is VTA coverage sufficient to provide timely public transit commute opportunities for everyone who lives in Palo Alto.
A VTA Eco-Pass might be a credible option for those who rely heavily on VTA, but it will not put bus routes on roads that don’t have them.
I apologize for any confusion that I may have cause from previous posts.
Palo Alto overbuilt and overoccupied office space. That caused the traffic problems. If the Council would address that, then it would be possible to consider more housing. More housing will add more people and more traffic. Claiming it won’t is just alternative facts. If low density neighborhoods were the cause of the problem, we would have had these same traffic woes twenty years ago, and we did not. Residents are already subsidizing developers, didn’t you read about that?
I have yet to see anyone villify Palantir. I have also yet to see them behave as good citizens here, considerng the negative impact they and their employees have had on development, downtown, quality of life, and just overall denigrating this town with utter, um, alternative facts (Downing). The codes need to be enforced so that companies that need room to grown can move on (they were never supposed to make diwntiwn an office park), just as Facebook did, and smaller startups from Stanford have space again. The obvious answer is relocating to San Jose, which is still desperately hoping to develop downtown into a vibrant urban center. That would keep a lot of the traffic down there, too. Housing is cheaper, and they actually could use some high rise development. Lots of friends have made the move.
Why don’t people ever consider using prices to manage demand when it comes to parking? If it is free, people have no incentive to use less of it. The marginal cost between taking a bus that you could miss on either way, and the cost of moving your car that you’ve already paid for is very skewed towards the car. It’s amazing what how far some Palo Altans will go to keep parking in downtown free and full rather than paid and well-managed. But if PA ever finds the courage to stand-up to the parking communists, then the revenue from paid parking can support a fantastic TDM program.
Complementary to Evan’s vision,
City of Palo Alto is the lead agency (I am the Principal Investigator) for the:
$1.1M Bay Area Fair Value Commuting demonstration Project, part of:
the FTA Mobility on Demand Sandbox program.
Stanford’s commute program reduced SOV from 75% to 50%, eliminating construction of $107M worth of parking structures. Stanford uses carrots and sticks, about $3/day stick for SOV and $3/day carrot for alternatives. Using Stanford as a starting point, we’re creating a next-generation, regionally scalable commute system for future policy consideration. System components include enterprise & smartphone apps, carrots/sticks, electric scooter/bike, microtransit, and advanced ridesharing. Our 24-month project runs Jan 2017 thru Dec 2018, with 11 employers piloting our system.
The term “Fair Value Commuting” pertains to combining carrots and sticks to more-accurately reflect full costs and benefits.
A two-page PDF describing the project: https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/docs/FTA%20MOD%20Project%20Description%20-%20Palo%20Alto.pdf
@steve raney, one of the ways that Stanford has “reduced” their SOV is by pushing their parking into neighborhoods like Southgate and Evergreen Park. Every morning there are many people who park on residential streets, pull bikes out of their trumk or off a bike rack ( or in some cases, unchain them from a street lightt) and ride onto campus.
Classic. The discussion on the “Gunn staff address conflicts following MLK Day talk” article has been closed for further discussion”.
As a previous poster pointed out, “We have both in Palo Alto now: effective censorship on conservative or libertarian ideas, and official endorsement of progressive stances.”
To @Open, I would love to respond to your post however it appears my views are shut down.
Wow, not only that but the discsssion on the “Stanford University issues international travel warning” has been closed for discussion as well. With only three comments, nothing even remotely close to objectionable on either side. Why is this that thread closed? Are you afraid people just might be hearing more truth than the misrepresented info that most news I see reporting?????
What is with all this censorship?
Allen’s logic is correct. What does the editorial author think of that? Ride services actually increase traffic. They may reduce the need for cars and parking, but not traffic.
Alternative transportation means walking, biking, transit. Those need to be made safer and more accessible. If not, the only answer is to manage traffic by managing demand. That means managing growth.
Allow me to define “under-parked” offices, retail, housing and other commercial properties. In the case of University Avenue’s commercial core, starting April 1 residential neighborhoods will be subjected to 1100+ non-resident parking permits to be issued for residential neighborhoods: Crescent Park, Downtown North, Downtown South and Professorville.
In the case of new permit parking program for California Avenue, at least 250 non-resident permits will be issued for adjacent residential neighborhoods, ie Evergreen Park and Mayfield neighborhoods.
Furthermore all of these neighborhoods are subject to unlimited 2-hour parking by non-residents.
ALL Downtown office business land owners should be required to pay into parking garage and shuttle transportation for each of their employees at the time of dev. And anypually there after.
All Employees should be REQUIRED to park in garage spaces, this include all short shift retail and food service staff.
ALl street parking should be metered, as in RWC for short term retail, and food shoppers, visitors.
This IS how it is done in other small cities who are at the forefront of thinking about their downtown congestion problems.
Residential street parking should be permitted for the property owners , renters only by permitted sticker.
Add another few garages…….as well. City council are the ones who are swayed by developer interests by $$ toward their campaigns, and they all fail to look at the big picture of how the whole development of higher density apt, hotels, and housing along the WHOLE EL CAMINO CORRIDOR is effecting each of the cities and the quality of life we once cherished.
But they don’t care, they have blinders on and do NOT see the sum total of their individual development projects they approve and the impact.
Let’s just suppose Evan’s efforts are 110% successful. Then Zap, up will go other office building.
I commute from San Carlos and would love to take the train but cannot find a shuttle from the Palo Alto train station that goes down Hamilton St. I have trouble walking and the short walk is too difficult. Is there a shuttle I have missed?
@ Evin Goldin
A couple of examples of “underparking,” & zero parking, are Hotel Keen & Epihany Hotel, neither of which has onsite parking for guests. Epiphany does valet but Keen offers no guest parking. Shoving hotel guests’ cars into nearby residential areas is irresponsible. P&Z obviously allowed this travesty. Developers argue that they intended to attract visitors who’d arrive by train is absurd. Even guests who may arrive by train often need cars to get around town to various meetings &r appointments not easily accessed without cars.
Housing is available in Palo Alto if one has enough money. If workers complain about commuting to Palo Alto, they can either look for work closer to where they live or pay the prices. Businesses would do their employees a big favor by locating their offices in more affordable communities, perhaps across the Bay, thus easing wear & tear on bridges as well as on roads
Not long ago I decided to try the shuttle. I was pleasantly surprised at how smooth it was, the driver was considerate and polite, and it was a low stress ride. But
I really don’t like the tasteless goofy pictures on the windows. Childish and undignified. I’ve used buses in other cities for years, but this shuttle makes me feel silly, or odd. So I avoid it. Not suitable for grownups. Whose taste is that?
“Palo Alto has a very distortedly high ratio of businesses to housing. The only solution is to fix the ratio by either decreasing business zoning or increasing the housing stock.”
The facts are simple and direct: more people = more cars = more traffic.
Housing proponents neglect the inconvenient facts that regional transit is inadequate and very unlikely to change, people prefer their own cars anyway, and the commute volume out of Palo Alto is at least as large as the incoming. More housing = more people = more cars = … .
We need to decrease our business element. The Rust Belt would love to have our surplus jobs. Upgrade the emptied office buildings to housing, and/or tear them down to make parks.
@Allen Akin, thanks for your question, which asks — if someone is going from A to B, and another from C to D, aren’t we adding more miles than if each person drove themselves. A couple things here:
1. Ridesharing services actually offer the ability for the driver to enter their own destination. When I drive to San Francisco for work, I enter driver mode in the Uber/Lyft apps and put in my destination. I get matched with people headed the same way. Any rides I give are NOT adding cars to the road, because I was going to drive anyway.
2. Rides can be pooled together. If we can get a transportation demand management agency with significant funding to encourage use of ridesharing services, match rates will skyrocket. When Lyft Line first launched in San Francisco, match rates were low (sub 25%). Now, the typical ride has 2 passengers in it, and some even have 3-4! So rather than 4 separate cars driving separate passengers, you have one car driving up to 4 passengers.
3. In your scenario, you’re assuming the driver is able to get to their destination and immediately turn off their car. As anyone who drives in Palo Alto knows, that’s not the case :). In fact, the driver needs to look for parking. A recent study from 2006 in Brooklyn found 45% of drivers on a specific block were cruising for parking. I don’t think the percentage is nearly as high in Palo Alto, but there’s no question that some additional miles (10-20% would be my guess) are spent looking for parking. That wouldn’t be the case with a rideshare.
4. If you can really hit scale, you can get many more people in one vehicle. In San Francisco, my company, Chariot, runs 14-seater vans on a number of routes through San Francisco. These vans are often totally full! It’s going to take time for this to be possible in Palo Alto, but it could happen. And imagine the traffic reduction if it did.
Thanks Anne. We’ve been painted as the culprits and bad guys too long. I never met and collaborated with neighbors on how to keep our home values high at the expense of the good of the community. But the floggers won’t stop. Just ignore them!
It doesn’t bother me that Evan advocates ride sharing. It does bother me that he doesn’t mention he’s an exec at a small ride sharing company and previously had a similar role at Lyft. https://www.linkedin.com/in/evangoldin
It’s ok to write guest editorials advocating your product, but at least mention your financial interest.
@Evan Goldin,
Your points 1, 2, and 4 are about pooling, which I covered in my note. The crucial question isn’t how many people can be pooled into one vehicle, it’s what fraction of trips can be served in that way. If it’s 1% (exaggeration to make the point clear), then even putting *everyone* who can pool into *one* vehicle yields only 1% improvement. I’m not familiar with good studies on this (it isn’t my field), but I see that we already have significant pooling using Caltrain and corporate buses and shuttles, yet we still have unacceptable traffic. This suggests, though it doesn’t prove, that the poolable fraction here and now is still low. Raising that fraction involves solving bigger problems. I’m sure Chariot understands all this, I’m just making it explicit for anyone following this discussion.
Your point 3 (cruising for parking) has a counterpart in the ridesharing case. What does the driver do after dropping off the last passenger in a group? S/he has to park or drive. Responding to the next passenger right away increases the extra driving between passengers. Waiting until a critical mass of passengers is available reduces driving between passengers, but requires parking. There’s no free lunch. Techniques for reducing cruising are already available; zoned parking, reserved spaces, valet parking, guidance systems, and so on. Some of these are planned or in use in Palo Alto. They work for both owner-drivers and ridesharing drivers.
Thanks!
@ Observer, from earlier today–
How far up Hamilton do you have to go? The VTA 35 bus goes from the train station up Hamilton, then turns for a stop on Waverley, at the Post Office.
Steve Trent – high density housing does not help reduce traffic/parking in Palo Alto, unless you live walking distance to work ( which would be rare). Also I don’t quite think that high density housing would reduce home prices. In fact it would set a floor for houses. And developers would probably not sell high density condos for less than 800-900$/sq ft, which would increase prices of houses to a floor of at least $1100/sq ft even for the crappiest house.
Face it, mass housing is not a real solution to these issues. All it does is allow in some more people into PA (those that cant afford a single family house here), and would increase traffic and congestion.
Rideshare businesses are keeping their prices low using private investor subsidies. They are hungry for some TDM to be their next sugar daddy. Make your for-profit business profitable on your own. (And pay your drivers are decent wage-compensation for gas, insurance, and wear and tear on the car) while you are at it.
Posted by Chip
a resident of Professorville
17 hours ago
@ Evin Goldin
“A couple of examples of “underparking,” & zero parking, are Hotel Keen & Epihany Hotel, neither of which has onsite parking for guests. Epiphany does valet but Keen offers no guest parking. Shoving hotel guests’ cars into nearby residential areas is irresponsible. P&Z obviously allowed this travesty. Developers argue that they intended to attract visitors who’d arrive by train is absurd. Even guests who may arrive by train often need cars to get around town to various meetings &r appointments not easily accessed without cars.
Housing is available in Palo Alto if one has enough money. If workers complain about commuting to Palo Alto, they can either look for work closer to where they live or pay the prices. Businesses would do their employees a big favor by locating their offices in more affordable communities, perhaps across the Bay, thus easing wear & tear on bridges as well as on roads”
I agree strongly with this post. Plus I thought the entire idea was to show up to the “Epiphany” in a luxury auto, preferably red. Need to be seen. Then car must be valet-parked, because as everyone knows, Palo Alto is a large important city. Taking the Caltrain doesn’t match this image.
@Steve Raney: “Stanford parks in Evergreen Park” is correct. It would be interesting to know how Stanford quantifies the reduction in SOV from 75% to 50%. Does that include the enterprising Stanford employees who take advantage of the carrots AND the sticks to decrease annual parking cost by approximately $1000 annually? Those at the lower end of the pay scale would be more likely to consider this option. It’s easy enough to park in Palo Alto neighborhoods and walk/skateboard etc. to the Marguerite. I work at PAMF at the 795 El Camino Real location. Stanford employees were parking in the PAMF parking garage and walking to Marguerite until PAMF management and security teams cracked down. When caught, one of the Stanford employees said “I was wondering how long it was going to take you to catch me.” It’s not hard to assume that person just shifted his SOV driving and parked in a different Palo Alto garage or neighborhood without parking restrictions. I recall that Stanford has in the past been required to address SOV’s in order to to get approval for their expansion plans. I hope that Palo Alto City Council realizes that Stanford’s programs have unintended consequences.
Stanford parking fee chart URL:
https://transportation.stanford.edu/parking/purchase-a-parking-permit/permit-prices-2016-17
Evan, I like your ideas, but getting most people out of their cars is just not realistic. Automobiles represent freedom of choice, they are needed for shopping, they are a place to keep one’s things, a place to nap, etc. etc.
If you think Embarcadero and El Camino is bad now, wait until Castilleja ramrods their massive expansion plans through a submissive City Hall. Hundreds of additional car trips per day on Embarcadero, a massive underground garage in a R1 neighborhood, and heightened safety concerns for cyclists and pedestrians. Oh, and 6-9 years of construction on Embarcadero. And what does Castilleja contribute? Nothing. No taxes, just income. And they have no qualms bullying the neighbors. #stopcastilleja pnqlnow.org
Get rid of Prop 13 and use the property taxes rated off of the true value of homes to pay for infrastructure improvements to better handle commute traffic. It would likely also spur homeowners into not blocking new housing development, which would cause more supply to go onto the market and lower demand for their home (and thus lower their property taxes).