Photo Photos By Elliott Burr/Town Crier

Cars nestle in free two-hour parking stalls along Main Street in downtown Los Altos, above, while a no parking sign on Third Street limits the capacity of incoming traffic the city can handle, inset.

It’s easy to use the current recession as the scapegoat for downtown Los Altos’ continuing retail struggles. But statistics point to a greater problem. City-compiled data reports that sales-tax revenues, based on the fortunes of downtown businesses, have declined steadily over a 13-year period when adjusted for inflation. Three other cities used for comparison, Mountain View, Burlingame and Los Gatos, all registered upswings.

Getting serious about solutions, city officials and business leaders are launching marketing campaigns, currently highlighted by Los Altos A to Z (see Page 5), sprucing up landscaping and discussing plans that include additional office and living space to draw more people downtown.

How big a role does parking play? It’s a perennial subject of debate. For some, the downtown simply does not have a parking problem. For others, preserving retail and restaurant activity downtown depends on increasing the number of available stalls.

Development options

To that end, a 12-member Los Altos Downtown Development Committee has reviewed options during the past 18 months. It started with consideration of a 200-stall above-ground parking garage next to Los Altos Grill on San Antonio Road. That evolved into a more ambitious plan involving office space and underground parking in the three south parking plazas off San Antonio Road.

The goal, according to the committee, is to bring more people downtown to generate demand for goods and services. Creating more parking is seen as part of the equation.

“A great solution is to have a city-owned parking garage so that many employees and some customers will know that parking is available,” said downtown commercial real estate broker Ron Labetich, a committee member. “But funding is nonexistent.”

Bringing in a developer to build office space in the plazas could be a sound strategy, said Anne Stedler, the city’s economic coordinator. That developer, she said, would greatly reduce city costs for additional parking.

“Almost half of the (19-acre) downtown core is public,” Stedler said. “The public has enormous leverage as to what happens downtown.”

Under committee discussion are three test cases for office and parking development under a public/private partnership. The scenarios project an additional 500-800 office workers downtown and 600-712 parking stalls (200 additional spaces in each case). The options, included in a “Downtown Los Altos Public Parking Plazas Opportunity Study,” are scheduled for further discussion Aug. 25 during a study session between the committee and the Los Altos City Council.

“The committee believes these public benefits are seriously, perhaps critically, needed for the economic well-being of our downtown,” said Councilwoman Val Carpenter, chairwoman of the committee. “In a time when our downtown is steadily growing less competitive as a retail destination, the committee’s study lays out feasible opportunities we can realistically pursue.”

‘High cost of free parking’

Enter two Los Altos brothers, both active downtown businessmen, who have a revelatory take: Free parking is a problem that thwarts economic growth. But changing the parking model, they contend, also provides the solution.

Ted and Jerry Sorensen discovered this as they researched building a three-story office building downtown. This sparked their months-long study.

Along the way, they came across UCLA professor and planning expert Donald Shoup, author of “The High Cost of Free Parking” (American Planning Association, 2005). In the book, Shoup maintains that free parking is costing hundreds of billions of dollars and that everyone pays for it “except the motorist.” Shoup (no relation to Los Altos founder Paul Shoup) also contends in his book that free parking encourages more vehicle trips and more solo drivers, thus creating more auto pollution. Paid parking results in the opposite.

“The space required for parking has made downtowns less vibrant, less walkable and reduced its aesthetic charm,” wrote Ted Sorensen and Forrest Linebarger in their report, “The New Science of Parking.” The study is credited to the GreenTown Los Altos Sustainable Land Use Group of which Linebarger is chairman and Ted Sorensen is vice chairman. The Sorensens and Linebarger presented their report at the July 21 downtown development committee meeting.

The Sorensens calculate that each new parking stall costs $90,000. That’s money better spent on actual building space, they said.

“There’s currently 40 percent more (downtown) parking than building,” Ted Sorensen said.

His figures show 486 public spaces in the downtown core.

The Sorensens contend that the downtown layout, with its parking plazas, was fine for the 1960s and 1970s but became outdated as market forces changed. Free parking allows employees to park closest to businesses, frustrating potential customers. In addition, the Sorensens said the current Los Altos requirement of four stalls per 1,000 square feet of added floor space not only inhibits development, but creates stalls that go unused much of the time. The result, they said, is wasted money and less potential profit for businesses.

Parking meters downtown?

What the Sorensens want to do might be considered counter intuitive at first: install paid parking meters in the downtown core. This, in theory, forces employees to park in outlying areas and clears space for customers.

The city currently has a prepaid employee-parking program in place downtown, monitored with parking decals. However, that hasn’t stopped employees from parking close to stores, then moving to different spaces when the time limit expires. The decal also doesn’t stop the city’s Community Services Officer Rod Sayre from issuing $54 tickets when vehicles exceed the time limit.

The Sorensens said a “tiered parking” solution could allow customers free parking for the first 90 minutes, then charge for “stay-over fees” without the risk of getting ticketed. Employees could be incentivized to park farther away with free, all-day parking. “Smart meters” can accept credit cards as payment, so there would be no issue of finding change to feed the meter. Such systems, already in place in communities like Pasadena and Redwood City, have been successful, they said.

“We were skeptical at first, but the more we looked into it, the more it made sense,” said Jerry Sorensen, adding that in other cities where meters were installed, they “created revenue that caused (cities) to spruce up the place.”

The Sorensens also want to see private lots that go unused after 5 p.m., when the workday ends, open to public use during the evenings.

“There are 900 empty stalls every second of every day,” Jerry Sorensen said. “But they’re all private.”

They’d like to see the city make arrangements with private owners for stall use, with the city assuming the liability.

Other ideas in “The New Science of Parking” report include employee incentives to use alternative transportation and use of “spillover” sites, such as the Hillview Community Center, near the downtown.

“The GreenTown … presentation does present some interesting ideas in that many private parking lots are underutilized throughout the downtown.” Labetich said. “Reallocating the existing parking program (gives) more value to street parking by shifting the free parking time allowed.”

Changing the formula

Then there’s the matter of parking-to-floor development ratios. The Sorensens suggest a reduction in the ratio of required stalls per 1,000 square feet of office space, from the current 4 to a range of 1.6 to 2.4.

These ratios, the Sorensens said, better reflect average parking use. Just changing these standards, they said, would encourage more building and would bring millions of additional dollars to the city.

“The beauty of it is, it can happen overnight,” Jerry Sorensen said.

Stedler said the downtown development committee is recommending a reduction to 3.3 stalls per 1,000 square feet.

“If we go to 3.3 per 1,000, we significantly increase the viability of the (public/private office) project,” she said.

While the Sorensens support the options outlined in the opportunity study, they contend the city could reorganize its parking program instead of paying for a garage, profiting in the process.

Meters, the Sorensens estimated, could generate yearly revenues of up to $1.2 million while reducing congestion by 30 percent. Proceeds could go into a “Parking Benefit District” to fund downtown improvements.

“You put in the meters and your problems are solved,” Ted Sorensen said.

Not everyone agrees.

“I think it’s a very bad idea,” said Los Altos City Councilman Ron Packard, a member of the downtown development committee. “Our two major competitors are Stanford Shopping Center and Santana Row, and they have free parking. (Meters) would draw people away from Los Altos.”

“I think the devil’s in the details,” Carpenter said of the Sorensens’ plan. “I don’t think we have a parking problem now. … But parking (requirements) does hold down redevelopment.”

Downtown property owner Jon Rayden said he thought installing meters might be a good idea.

“If there was a no-hassle way to accomplish that, if you had a system without coins, I think (meters) would help,” he said.

However, Rayden said he sees three additional issues key to downtown revival: more office employees, more residents living here and “a vibrant nightlife. You need all four.”

Time-limit changes welcome

“It’s not just about parking,” said Nancy Dunaway, executive director of the Los Altos Village Association, the downtown merchants’ group. “The city should be more concerned about the (downtown) vacancy rate (9.45 percent) than the parking.”

She said the recent change from the Los Altos Police Department in expanding parking limits from two to three hours in the central parking plaza was a welcome one.

“(Police) really heard people’s concerns that they didn’t have enough time (to do business) without moving their cars,” Dunaway said.

“I felt it was a good opportunity (for downtown business) to increase tha

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