Is the End of 'Free’ Parking in San Diego on the Horizon? I Hope So
One of the silver linings of living through the pandemic has been the realization that streets are good for more than automobiles.
City planners and environmental activists have been telling us this for years, but giving up an inch of asphalt to King Car has generally proved to be a non-starter.
Now those old assumptions are fading away.
Even so, get ready for a grand revival of automotive angst as 30th Street in North Park gets repaved and dedicated bike lanes are added this summer.
Although this idea has been floating around since 2013, we’re sure to see KUSI sending an addled announcer to the neighborhood who’ll seek out a few business owners to sell viewers on the concept of less parking equals doom.
Their purportedly popular protests over the past few years have done little to nothing to prove their point. A “grassroots neighborhood” petition campaign turned out to be an embarrassing collection of signatures from nowhere in particular. A street protest barely filled one corner sidewalk as hundreds of bike riders rode by in support of a street makeover.
Compare these few whiners with the lessons learned by others around the city over the past year plus and you’ll begin to see just how short sighted they are.
In 2020, restaurants discovered that outdoor dining was key to their survival, and local governments let them do it. Now that accommodation has been extended while assorted bureaucracies figure out standards and (I’m assuming) fees.
Here’s a snip from a KPBS report featuring restaurant owner Tammy Piehl reflecting on how her business changed:
Piehl is far from the only business owner to benefit. Since the pandemic began, San Diego has approved more than 400 permits for outdoor business operations. Most of them have been set up on space that was previously reserved for parked cars.
Yet, in a city where residents and businesses have fought countless battles to preserve as much parking as possible, there appears to be little evidence of a backlash against the expansion of outdoor dining. When the City Council last week extended the policy to July 2022, no one called in to demand their parking back.
A recent high-profile battle over parking took place right by Piehl's restaurants. In 2019, the city proposed removing street parking on 30th Street to create protected bike lanes. A group called Save 30th Street Parking sued the city to stop the project. A judge later cleared the project for construction while the lawsuit continues, and the city expects to complete the bike lanes by late summer or early fall.
Piehl said before the pandemic her employees would often complain about trouble finding parking. But now, with even fewer parking spaces, everyone seems to have adapted just fine.
"I don't think I've heard about a parking complaint since we've reopened," Piehl said. "They've really found ways to accommodate, and that can include biking to work."
A trip to Little Italy these days is a qualitatively better experience, thanks to a vibrant street life. And maybe I’m just lucky, but parking doesn’t seem any more difficult. I’m not seeing letters to the editor complaining about a loss of parking spaces ruining small businesses' livelihoods.
As is true with any change, common sense needs to be applied to the process of expanding streetlife. There’s one “outdoor” space on Washington Street that should serve as a warning to passersby about the quality of the experience available in the adjacent restaurant.
The pre-COVID hue and cry over dedicating parts of El Cajon Boulevard to Rapid (er) Transit busses has turned out to be unwarranted. I drive down that road nearly everyday and have yet to see one of the predicted impossible traffic jams.
I don’t take my car downtown for errands anymore. The 215 Express gets me there in less time and for a lot less money than driving and parking.
Back in my college days, I lived in Ocean Beach and attended classes at San Diego City College. On days when my roommates' schedules didn’t match up with my own I took the bus; this added a minimum of two hours to my commute provided the busses and I were running on time.
The bottom line: living in San Diego without a car sucks.
Fifty years later, things haven’t changed all that much. During my most recent bout with cancer, the time required for taking public transit from North Park to UCSD’s medical campus for radiation treatments was about 75 minutes each way. I managed to avoid that particular commute --most of the time-- thanks to a willing niece and the county’s program for transporting cancer patients.
What I didn’t avoid was the contribution my twice daily trips made toward ruining the planet. Even when I rode in hybrid or electric vehicles my trip was still spewing microplastics (tire wear), micro-particles of the hydrocarbon mixture known as bitumen (road surfaces), and the heavy metals found in road dust. And all that’s before we get into debates about what comes off the different types of brake pads.
The bottom line: living on earth while worshiping at the throne of car supremacy sucks.
Don’t get me wrong. Our household has a car, which, whether or not I like the idea, is a necessity. We have an off street parking space. At our social gatherings back in the before times, the lack of parking nearby occupied the place of opening lines in other climates about the weather.
Still, in the long term we’ll all be better off when transportation alternatives become a reality.
https://twitter.com/jonburkeUK/status/1399767194553262080?s=20
Next month the San Diego City Council will consider a proposal to make the city less car-reliant and more climate-friendly by eliminating parking requirements for businesses located near mass transit or in small plazas near dense residential areas. This change would be retroactive, allowing businesses in those areas to immediately transform parking spots into other uses. Bigger shopping areas, like Fashion Valley, would be unaffected.
Get ready for another round of short-sighted commentary about how such plans don’t make sense until a transportation infrastructure (which none of those complaining will support) gets built out.
From the Union-Tribune’s coverage:
City parking requirements currently vary by business and area of the city, but restaurants and retail stores are required to provide significantly more spots than other types of businesses.
Surface parking spots typically cost $25,000 each, so a business required to provide 20 spots would have to spend roughly $500,000 on parking. Parking garages are even more expensive, with each space costing as much as $100,000.
The proposal is supported by many business leaders, merchant groups and organizations focused on the environment.
“Parking is not only expensive to build but also expensive to maintain,” Angeli Calinog, a policy adviser for the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, told the Planning Commission Thursday. “This will make new business development more affordable, allowing the choice to provide parking for customers where public transit, jobs and services are already close by.”
The arguments against this proposal run the gamut of NIMBYisms. “Not enough study, reducing quality of life, lack of public input,” etc.,etc., are all excuses for not doing anything.
Meanwhile, 2030’s climate disasters continue to loom large on the horizon. Some idiot Republican Senator called advocates a “cult” this weekend, and I’m sure the know-nothings of the right will repeat his nonsense in between QAnon meetings.
In the area of transportation, pushing back against climate change involves a political, legal, and culture shift. We do not have the luxury of waiting long enough to convince a minority of people who believe the status quo is fine. Yes, mistakes will be made. Let's learn from them, make things right where needed, and move on.
Gregory Schill’s Atlantic article about automotive supremacy shows just how top down and intersectional this mindset is:
In America, the freedom of movement comes with an asterisk: the obligation to drive. This truism has been echoed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has pronounced car ownership a “virtual necessity.” The Court’s pronouncement is telling. Yes, in a sense, America is car-dependent by choice—but it is also car-dependent by law.
A key player in the story of automobile supremacy is single-family-only zoning, a shadow segregation regime that is now justifiably on the defensive for outlawing duplexes and apartments in huge swaths of the country. Through these and other land-use restrictions—laws that separate residential and commercial areas or require needlessly large yards—zoning rules scatter Americans across distances and highway-like roads that are impractical or dangerous to traverse on foot. The resulting densities are also too low to sustain high-frequency public transit.
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In his book The High Cost of Free Parking, UCLA professor Donald Shoup explains that free or very cheap on-street parking contributes to traffic congestion in a major way.
Watch him explain just how bad this is (he compares free parking to blood-letting) in this Vox video:
https://youtu.be/Akm7ik-H_7U?t=83
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