Opinion: The Myth About Parking

I went to the City Council meeting this past Tuesday to speak on the Parking and Transportation Demand Management Report. If you think that’s a mouthful, you should see what was in there.

But first, let me say how the pallor has lifted at Council chambers, what with five fully formed adults on the dais. I’m not here to dance on anyone’s grave, but wow, what a difference some civility makes. Gone was the menacing, gurgling Vesuvius that erupted at every meeting, lava spewing, making chambers feel like a living hell – or at least Pompeii.

Instead, we have respectful, dignified and civil discourse – at a decibel level that doesn’t hurt the ears – among five well-spoken and thoughtful council members, with a sense of teamwork.   

Now about that parking plan. It was an update on the work the city and consultants Fehr and Peers have done to find more parking and direct cars to them more efficiently. It’s from the committee headed by Mayor Whalen and Mayor Pro Tem Sue Kempf, so you know it has heft. And to borrow a management consulting term, they boiled the ocean to identify every granular opportunity to move cars through our streets and into parking stalls, from smartphone apps and wayfaring signs to small lot conversions and ambitious multistory garages. Twenty-three locations were studied, with eighteen being deemed feasible. A thoroughly depressing number to ponder. But it was thoroughly depressing. Cars are the problem that led us here, and any effort to accommodate more of them in our city streets will just make the problem worse. Traffic consultants call it induced demand, and it’s why we should never add lanes to Laguna Canyon Rd.

Why, after all these years of congestion pain, are we not making a priority out of planning for a future with fewer cars, like so many enlightened cities? Do we really want our unique character pockmarked with more indiscriminate lots dotting our landscape, with cars jockeying to reach them, some with mechanical lifts so we can double the capacity – like big urban jungles? More cars coursing through our town, belching fumes, making noise? It sounds like some dystopian future that looks more like 1970 than 2030.

Our town is just seven miles long, so we can easily make it the kind of multi-modal village where people are so much happier to ditch the cars at home – or on the periphery of town – and choose among many fun, healthy, al fresco ways to tour and traverse our community. Any plan for circulation improvement must take a holistic approach to include every other transport option and how to develop the connective tissue that ties them together.

When will we get serious about integrating bike infrastructure into our transportation grid instead of kicking it down the road, as this report did? We already have proof of concept with the proliferation of adolescent e-bikers who revel in the freedom and joy of two-wheel transport. How about getting the whole family on board with a dedicated north-south bike lane along Glenneyre, and safe and prominent bike corrals for parking? And for those who live near a park, why not rent an eBike from an adjacent kiosk, ride to the Sawdust and return it to a kiosk there? As for visitors, how about parking at one of the three periphery lots that keeps cars from coming into downtown – El Moro to the north, the beautiful Digester to the east (and central to the Arts District), and take your pick of South Laguna locations – Mission Hospital, St Catherine’s School, or Lang Park (sorry South Laguna, you gotta give us one to free your neighborhoods in return). Then attach bike kiosks and run free shuttles into town on the regular. Once we take over Coast Highway from CalTrans, we can reimagine it with an express trolley lane down the middle. And then discourage driving downtown with costly congestive surcharges. And restrict parking in our neighborhoods, all allowed by Coastal Commission because we are providing alternative access to our beaches. This will do wonders for our quality of life, clean air, quiet, and obliterate the need for more parking.

And then there are other ways of discouraging commuters just using the Pacific Coast byway for what its name signifies – a highway. Prevail upon County officials to make the toll road free.

Let’s envision what we want Laguna to look like in 2050, be more generational in our thinking than transactional. Do we want more sheet metal, more traffic, more frayed nerves, more tempers flaring, more stop and go, or can we be the shining city of the future, with perfect weather and heavenly terrain to walk, bike, skate, ride share, trolley, shuttle and bus? A conscious, healthy, enlightened seaside village versus a bloated parking lot that has sacrificed its soul for the scourge of convenience.

Freshman Councilman Mark Orgill said it best: he watches the massive crowds assemble for the fourth of July every year, and then leave. Where do they all park? And on those busy summer days, when Main Beach is one big pit of fleshly humanity, where do they all park? And on Hospitality Night, when the entire community descends on downtown, where do they all park? Somewhere, obviously. We don’t have a parking problem. We have a traffic problem. And we can fix it. It just takes looking past today towards a less car-dependent future.

Billy is the CEO of La Vida Laguna, an E-bike and ocean sports tour company. Email: [email protected].