The Report that Has Been Suppressed
In June 2020, the City Council majority voted to advance the planning on a parking structure Downtown without considering Nelson\\Nygaard’s Economics of Parking: Santa Cruz Strategic Parking Plan. Download the complete study. The City entered a $100,000 contract with Nelson\\Nygaard in 2016, before City staff hatched the idea for a 6-level parking structure with the library as a ground floor tenant.
The contract called for Nelson\\Nygaard to make a presentation to the City Council. That never happened.
The report does not recommend a new garage. Instead it recommends alternatives to building a new parking structure. Scroll down for excerpts from the report and a link to download the complete report.
Better Parking Solutions
The Nelson\Nygaard report states: “If the above parking management strategies are deemed insufficient to accommodate future demand, the City may consider provision of new off-street parking facilities.” Staff brought the proposal for the parking structure to the City Council before receiving the Nelson Nygaard study results. So the City’s timing in considering a parking structure did not comply with the study recommendation.
1. Increased parking pricing [However, this price increase was motivated by the need to finance the garage.]
2. Made free bus passes available to all workers Downtown [The bus passes were approved on a 4-3 vote of the Council, with proponents of the new parking garage voting against.]
3. Installed electronic signs at the entrance to garages, indicating vacant spaces.
These are important beginning steps. Several important measures need to be implemented before a valid evaluation can be made of demand:
1. Issuing separate discount parking permits for use by residents of Downtown, that are not valid during peak occupancy periods of weekday afternoons. Residents parked at peak times would pay market rate. (City staff are now talking about doing this.)
2. Issuing discount parking permits to workers Downtown by the day rather than by the month. Paying by the month is an incentive to drive every day of the month.
3. Price permits, meters and off-street parking in accordance with demand.
4. Satellite parking. Locate discount permit parking to areas that are not in high demand by visitors to Downtown. The County Government Center lots are available on weekends. During the week the Holy Cross Church parking lot is available. The City abandoned the strategy of renting the Holy Cross Church lot when there was insufficient response from permit holders.
5. Utilize phone apps to allow visitors to find parking.
Excerpts from the October 15, 2015 joint meeting of Planning and Downtown Commissions:
Janis Rhodes, JR Parking Associates: “No agency will make enough on user fees to pay for that [new] parking space. All three of us professionals and all my peers in the industry have become very conservative. Maximize existing inventories [of parking] before financing new resources.”
“You want to maximize all these things that we talked about: your codes, your policies, your technology. You put all those things in place—and it’s not a short-term process—because it takes time to put them in place and see the results.”
Frederik Venter, Kimley Horn: “Incentives…bus passes…good software [for finding a parking space]…
Unbundle parking costs from housing cost in new development.”
Ria Hutabarat Lo, Nelson\\Nygaard: “Adjust the price of parking to manage demand.”
“Looking at the City’s parking code I can hazard a guess that maybe it might have been put in place in the 1960’s”
See the video of these presentations here.
Excerpts from the March 19, 2019 City Council Study Session on Parking Downtown
Patrick Siegman, led Nelson\\Nygaard’s study of Downtown Santa Cruz parking: “Santa Cruz has a parking management problem, not a parking supply problem.” Read more of Siegman’s analysis here.
Adam Millard-Ball, UCSC Professor of Environmental Studies “It’s cheaper to pay commuters not to drive than to build more parking.”
See the video of the City Council Study Session on this page.
Excerpts from the Nelson\\Nygaard Downtown Parking Study
- The most fiscally prudent approach to accommodating additional demand: Modernize parking management and better align parking prices to the cost of building and maintaining the system.
- There are a number of cost-effective tools the City has at its disposal to better distribute parking demand, from strategic adjustments to parking prices to better information and enhanced alternatives to driving.
- Parking is a valuable resource for improving auto accessibility, but oversupplying parking in a space-constrained area like a downtown can fragment the built environment, creating a less desirable place to work, live, visit, and walk around. City code provisions that require more parking to be built than the market demands increase the cost of development and relegate land that could support jobs, housing, and tax-generating uses to the storage of vehicles.
- The City should move forward on plans to adjust the off-street parking facilities in which permits are allowed based on parking occupancy data. Parking permits are also currently quite inexpensive relative to those of peer cities (see table at the end of this executive summary). The City should raise the price of permits (in concert with other parking prices) to better recover the cost of operating and maintaining the parking program. While doing so, the City might also consider the approach some peer cities have taken to accommodate lower-income downtown workers: Charging fees that are graduated based on income levels (i.e. lower rates for lower-wage employees; Santa Rosa and Monterey each have programs like this).
Other resources on best practices for addressing parking demand:
Todd Litman, Victoria Transport Policy Institute, Road and Parking Pricing
