Cat and mouse game: parking downtown

Parking time limits are to encourage turnover, so employees don't hog all the parking spaces and customers can find a place to park. Ask any retail store owner if they support parking time limits and they will say yes.

Should the business owners band together and pay to build a parking garage for their employees? That's a more complicated question. There are different types of businesses downtown with needs for different amounts of parking. It's going to be really hard for the city to organize something if the business owners can't agree on how much to pay.

How about special parking areas for employees, and an exempt sticker for their dashboards? These places would not be right up front near stores, but would be further away, perhaps in areas customers don't use very much. This would alleviate employees having to leave their stores or offices and playing musical chairs with their cars. When I worked for I.Magnin at Stanford decades ago, the employees parked beyond a red line in the pavement, which was out away from the stores. That worked well, and left all the close up places for the customers. We didn't mind the little extra walk at all.

How about a simple solution: raise the limit to 3 hours, but no re-parking downtown for another 3 hours.

Helps shoppers and restaurant-goers enjoy a leisurely meal, and pushes employee parking elsewhere.

The caltrain lot is also underutilized, and provides cheap all-day parking.

The City could sell all-day permits, good for 4 or 6 months at a time, to be used by downtown workers. If workers say they can't afford it, let business owners pay for them with the proviso that if the tag wasn't returned when an employee left the job, prorated cost would be deducted from the closing paycheck.

Downtowner:

they already sell 6 month parking permits. There's a waiting list to get one as they are limited to a certain number.

@ Menlo Voter -Thanks!

Maybe they could sell 1/2 day permits, 8-1 & 1-6?

It might help if valet spaces between El Camino & Doyle were available to non-diners.

Burlingame, San Mateo & Redwood City seem to do well with metered parking. I'd rather pay at a curbside meter than at the CalTrain lot. I dislike paying @CalTrain to eat at Borrone's & shop Keplers, but their underground lot is nearly crammed full.

This isn't just an employee issue. Residents and visitors are also impacted.
In fact, anyone not in walking distance to down town is impacted.

The rest of the Bay area, no, the rest of the world has active work cultures at their local coffee spots. I sometimes work down town. I eat there. I shop quite a lot there. I've received about three tickets. One was dismissed for lack of a photo - the others were for overstaying my welcome. One for overstaying my welcome by 15 minutes.

How much does the City make on parking tickets and on pictures taken by the cameras? Where does that money go? Does anyone know?

From another story, it's suggested that, eventually, parking ticket revenues will go towards building parking lots. Further motivation for the City to ticket as much as possible.

It's not difficult. Extend the parking time for some spaces like Palo Alto or allow people to put money in a meter and select a time like Redwood City. Or some combination. Lose the "you can't repark in other areas" concept. It's pretty un-user-friendly.

How about employees use public transit? OMG, they could actually use a bus, train, or a bicycle. Then they wouldn't have to move their cars every two hours. OMG, they would actually have to work a full day for a change. OR, public transit and WALK to work.

OMG, I don't work downtown but I know people who do, and they have the same busy lives as everyone else, needing to drop kids off at school or pick up someone at the airport or buy groceries for the family or keep a medical appointment or manage any one of a myriad of other responsibilities. Too, if you don't live near the train, using public transit can easily take four or five times as long as driving. Who has that luxury?

OMG they can still park and walk to work in designated areas. Moving the car every two hours isn't proper either. Where do they think their customers will come to spend money.

The City Council met recently to discuss this topic. One idea that seemed to gain interest was changing the two hour parking in the eight downtown parking plazas to three hour parking. Will this be implimented soon? As the City already provides Shuttles to help get around the City, perhaps a nearby parking lot could be used for employees with a Shuttle available both in the morning before work and again in the late afternoon, after work.

I question whether two hour parking limits make any difference at all. The perception is that it does; I wonder if reality would prove that out. For instanace, how about a relaxed parking enforcement week as a grand experiment and we can see in practice, if the parking lots are just as full this way as they are with heavy handed, aggressive police parking enforcement? My hunch is, more parking tickets are given out in Menlo Park in a week than the combined parking tickets in both Redwood City and Palo Alto combined, even though Menlo Park is half the size.