Hi,
My name is Josh Olson, a former resident of Menlo Park who moved away for an engineering education in the Midwest and didnt come back because it was too expensive.
I offer this advice as someone who grew up biking through the Santa Cruz Ave parking lots on my way to Hillview Middle School: you can do better than parking lots.
Parking lots are extremely expensive. Upfront, they cost a minimum of $10,000 per spot for surface level lots like Santa Cruz Ave is now. For garages, you are looking at around $30,000 per spot, and for underground garages (for places like my home in Madison, WI) they start at around $50,000-$60,000 a spot. For lots already built, you still are wasting the land in your core downtown on storing private vehicles for effectively zero revenue. At least that what Im told, the parking enforcement is lax in the area.
If you arent going to charge the market price for parking, you can do better by ensuring the land is utilized for something beneficial. Not everything has to generate revenue, but a park is worlds better than a parking lot. Parking lots subsidize drivers, thats all they are useful for. For a city in a deficit, you should consider taking the prime real estate that it is and finding something useful for it.
Speaking of, these go hand in hand:
[image.png]
Over parking makes for a dead downtown.
Some people got it right, if you want a vibrant downtown, you need people and people-focused things and not cars. Making parking spots creates incentives to quickly accomplish something and then leave. Creating safe spaces for people to walk or bike, and enjoy the area around them, incentivizes them to spend more and stay.
You are special in that your land is so incredibly valuable, you need to be careful about what you build. Especially in your Downtown, the money generator for businesses, its important to get things right. Cities around the country have started to do this by focusing on building people infrastructure rather than car infrastructure.
My recommendation to you:
1. Minimize the amount of parking you include in these projects if it takes away from housing units or retail
2. If not 1, create a mixed use space with parking that charges market rates for parking downtown
3. If not 2, charge market rates for parking downtown.
Leaving the parking lots as is, without making people pay, is a giant waste of money.
You could also do a parking study to determine how often the lots are left vacant.
Best of luck with this decision, and please read Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World if you still dont believe the impact this can have on any size city.
Thank you,
Josh Olson
