Parking is critical for access to downtown Palo Alto businesses. However, building new parking structures is very expensive, with costs of $50,700 per space, as well as ongoing maintenance and financing costs. There are practical alternatives to consider that can provide convenient access while managing parking supply, such as incentivizing employees to reduce driving through transit subsidies and parking cash-out programs. Effective parking management strategies utilized in other cities, such as variable pricing, residential permit programs, and new technologies, could help regulate parking occupancy downtown. Further study of alternative approaches is needed to balance the parking needs of customers, employees and residents.

1. Parking for Palo Alto
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2. Parking Needs
• Access to businesses is critical
o Customers need short term convenient access to shopping and
dining.
o Customers occassionally need longer term all day parking.
o Employees need to be able to quickly find longterm parking
• What's the best way to support more customers and jobs in
downtown Palo Alto?
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3. Parking Structures are Expensive
• $50,700 per space (cost from 2 PA downtown parking structures)
• Ongoing maintenance costs (Maintenance and operations costs $100 to
$200/yr per space from Mt View Parking Study)
• Ongoing financing costs of long term debt
• Encourages more vehicular traffic which degrades the downtown
experience
Are there practical alternatives to building new parking structures
that will give customers and employees convenient access to
downtown?
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4. Incent Employees to Reduce Driving
• Offer discounted transit passes
• Contribute Parking District fees to carpool, carshare and other TDM
programs
• For companies subsidizing parking permits provide cash out for
employees who don’t use them.
– Case studies of employers who offer parking cash out in Southern California
show that it reduced vehicle travel to work by 12% (Professor Shoup)
• Provide secure bicycle parking and showers when possible.
People commuting by bicycle is increasing locally.
– Palo Alto is now (in 2011) at 10.1%, up from 8.6% in 2010.
– Menlo Park is at 8.8% for the period 2008 – 2010 (no new data, fewer than
65,000 people).
– For the Stanford University the bicycle mode share is an astounding 40%.
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5. Operate Parking Structures Efficiently
• Provide convenient on site all day parking permits. Single day
pricing allows more flexible use of parking spaces and provides
incentives to use alternative transportation when possible.
• Valet parking can allow higher density utilization of parking
structures.
• Compact cars spaces take 20% less room. Lower cost permit
prices for compact cars may make sense.
• Information on the number of available spaces could be provided at
parking structure entrances.
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6. Managing Parking
A surprising amount of traffic isn’t caused by people who are on their way
somewhere. Rather it is caused by people who have already arrived. Our
streets are congested, in part, by people who have gotten where they want to
be but are cruising around looking for a place to park. --Donald Shoup
A majority of shoppers said that they intended to stay downtown for less than 1
hour while a majority of respondents who had come downtown to eat stated
that they intended to stay between 1 and 2 hours. --Mountain View Parking
Study
Being able to quickly find a space near their destination was the top parking
priority for both shoppers and diners. --Mountain View Parking Study
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7. Mountain View Parking Study
Note: The tables below show Mountain View downtown customers often spend significant time
searching for parking and the level of reparking by employees is ~12% of total parking events.
Note: The total number of parking events was: Thursday 8908, Friday 9663
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8. Redwood City (metered parking)
In 2006-2007 Redwood City instituted value pricing to revitalize the downtown.
Parking was not available for customers. Goal was to provide 85% occupancy (per guidance from
parking guru Donald Shoup) following success in Old Pasadena.
Time limits eradicated
All surplus revenue dedicated to improving downtown
Results:
Dan Zack, Downtown Development Coordinator, announced in 2009 that parking occupancy on
Broadway decreased from 100% full to 82%.
Average length of stay neared the desired one‐hour mark.
Monthly permit sales for city garages increased 50% as downtown employees moved off the streets
and into the garages to park.
Most important of all, Zack testifies that the desired growth came to the downtown. Even complaints
from the community, which were in full swing during the first year after implementation, have died
down.
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9. Burlingame (metered parking)
Back in 1999, the prices were a flat rate and not differentiated by demand. People approached the City
complaining that parking was difficult because people, mostly employees and shop‐owners, were
parking all day and feeding the meters.
The City decided to raise the parking rates along the store fronts and made it cheaper to park farther
away. They designated parking lots for long term parking especially for employees. Now parking
prices are lower with increasing walking distance from the core area to encourage employees to seek
out less expensive, more remote parking in the outer fringe of the district.
Results:
Overall the City considers the pricing system to be very successful.
The City achieved the desired turnover on the main street, Burlingame Avenue.
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10. San Mateo (metered parking)
On Street Parking:
Originally set at a two‐hour time limit for $0.50 cents an hour, the City found that people wanted to
spend more time than just 2 hours, and so increased the maximum time limit to 4 hours. The first two
hours are $0.50 per hour, after which it is $1 per hour.
Garage Parking:
Results:
There is a perception, mostly by seniors living near downtown and business located downtown, that
there is a lack of parking. Parking occupancy studies have shown 100% occupancy during peak hours
of 10:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Two of the parking garages, Central Parking
Garage and 2nd & El Camino Garage, are typically full with visitors and employers/employees. The
Main Street Garage is often full on evenings and weekends.
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11. San Jose (Residential Parking Permits)
In order to improve on‐street parking operations, minimize parking spillover, and improve the parking
supply/demand balance in Downtown, the City adopted residential parking permit zones in several
areas.
More than 50% of residences on each block had to sign the petition in support of permit parking to
qualify. Each residence had a single vote, and each unit in a multi‐unit residential building counted as
a residence.
Residential permits are sold for $30/year or $30/2‐years depending on the zone. The City of San Jose
charges $30/year for permits around the university since the university operates on a yearly basis, and
charges $30/2 years for permits in other zones. The maximum allowable permits issued per household
varies from 3 to 4 permits.
Results:
The permit fee is set for cost recovery and not revenue generation. Currently, however, the program
covers only 63% of its costs.
Due to budget cuts, the service of expanding existing RPP zones or adding new zones is no longer
provided because the department can only retain the staff who maintain the program.4
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12. Old Pasadena (metered parking)
Old Pasadena had no parking meters until 1993, and curb parking was restricted only by a two-hour
time limit. Customers had difficulty finding places to park because employees took up the most
convenient curb spaces, and moved their cars every two hours to avoid citations. The city’s staff
proposed installing meters to regulate curb parking, but the merchants and property owners opposed
the idea. They feared that paid parking would discourage people from coming to the area at all.
Customers and tenants, they assumed, would simply go to shopping centers like Plaza Pasadena that
offered free parking.
To defuse opposition, the city offered to spend all the meter revenue on public investments in Old
Pasadena.
They agreed to an unusually high rate of $1 an hour for curb parking, and to the unusual policy of
operating the meters on Sundays and in the evenings when the area is still busy with visitors.
The revenue thus amounts to $1,712 per meter per year.
Results:
Old Pasadena has done well in comparison with the rest of Pasadena. Its sales tax revenue increased
rapidly after parking meters were installed in 1993, and is now higher than in the other retail districts in
the city. Old Pasadena’s sales tax revenues quickly exceeded those of Plaza Pasadena, the nearby
shopping mall that had free parking.
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13. Key Suggested Actions
• Work with the city to enable the purchase of single day parking
permits on site.
• Work with the city to conduct a parking survey to understand existing
parking situation to get basic information such as time to find parking,
reparking rates, length of time parked, etc.
• Follow the Council's excellent recommendation to pursue
comprehensive studies of a menu of alternative approaches to
manage the parking supply, including pricing strategies, and
technology to manage existing spaces and transportation demand
management.
• Provide cash out option in lieu of free employee parking.
• Proactively work the city and residents to insure any residential
parking permit plan is balanced (no free permits for residents, all
costs covered).
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14. Additional Reading
Old Pasadena:
http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/SmallChange.pdf
Mt View Parking Study:
http://www.ci.mtnview.ca.us/civica/filebank/blobdload.asp?BlobID=8490
Lloyd district in Portland:
http://transportationalternatives.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/learning-from-portland-how-to-grow-jobs-
and-reduce-traffic/
Victoria Transportation Policy Institute:
http://www.vtpi.org/tca/tca0504.pdf
Blog reply:
http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/09/01/shoup-to-otoole-the-market-for-parking-is-anything-but-free/
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15. The following slides need revisions or
deletion
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16. Employee Case studies
• Secrets of the stars
o Stanford
o Facebook/Google
• TDM for the rest of us
o Lloyd District
o Moffett
o Other TMA
o Delete slide or find meaningful info.
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17. The business case
Current costs
• Cost for parking maintenance
• Cost of parking permits
Parking structure scenario
• Cost for parking maintenance++
• Cost of parking permits
Reduce demand for parking
• Cost for parking maintenance (same)
• Cost of parking permits (less)
• Cost of TDM (transit passes, carpool etc)
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18. Keep spaces free for customers
• Quote from Shoup Some relevant quotes from Shoup on slide 8
• Set prices so that 10-15% of spots are free
(one spot visible per block) The Shoup guidance is
confusing since there are no parking meters and the quote was for onstreet parking.
• Plentiful, visible bike parking
• Valet bike parking at large events
• Customers want a pleasant downtown
experience Cruising for parking and too many cars detracts from this.
18

19. Customer case studies
• SFPark, Pasadena, Santa
Monica, Burlingame, San Mateo, Redwood
City - add detail
• Downtown areas with priced parking thrive
• The case studies are covered in later slides
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20. Next steps
What business can do
• Encourage analysis of alternatives
• Support a Downtown Transportation Survey to provide
robust data about realistic solutions
• Promote solutions that provide better results for lower
costs
What the city can do
• Manage existing spaces with technology
• Analyze which trips can be substituted
• Negotiate with transit agencies
20

21. Research needed
• Quote from Donald Shoup about setting prices to leaving 10-
15% of spaces free (from "The High Cost of Free Parking")
• Contract for parking district - requested from City Staff by
Adina, 9/19
• Case studies of other local cities (use data from Mountain
View study
http://www.ci.mtnview.ca.us/civica/filebank/blobdload.asp?Bl
obID=8490) Done
• Lloyd business district - integrate data from here:
http://transportationalternatives.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/l
earning-from-portland-how-to-grow-jobs-and-reduce-traffic/
and here: http://www.lloydtma.org/
• Cost structure for businesses (request from Russ Cohen)
• Talk to Tom the Palo Alto economic development staff 21

22. Other Quotes:
U.S. motorist spend an average of about $4,500 annually per vehicle on direct
expenses. There are an estimated five parking spaces per vehicle with total
annualized costs of $4,400, much of which consumers bear indirectly. --
Victoria Transport Policy Institute
Note: Not everyone agrees on the number of parking spaces per vehicle.
One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country.
Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. New York Times article.
-- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parking-lots-seriously-as-public-
spaces.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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