MOSPR ad absurdem

If Mountain View has ever made a more ironically misguided decision than Tuesday's vote to hold the new train depot tenant responsible for creating new parking spaces, I can not imagine what it might have been.

Personally, I can't see myself interrupting my commute for "artisan cheese," shrimp scampi and oysters, but I suppose it's better use than the train museum idea readers used to suggest to me.

As embarrassing as it was to see the place lying empty for the first six years after the city spent millions to build the plaza, imposing $54,000 of extra costs for minimum off-street parking requirements is especially indefensible.

No no no no no no no no no.

*Exasperated sigh*

Parking structure downtown necessary

Rather than buying a gift for my dad, I spent a good part of Saturday analyzing all the logical fallacies in this editorial. (Sorry Dad). However, I'm not exactly a logician, so I deleted them and will just give you the gist:

It's wrong.

Two days before this editorial ran, the city council told the high school administrators they needed to do more to encourage students to make more responsible transportation choices. Now, inspired by the putative failure of completely baseless parking regulations that ignore basic principles of economics, the city is considering a massive subsidy to encourage people of all ages to drive to downtown, which is about half a mile from the high school.

To briefly engage in my own fallacious ad hominem attack, the best information I have on this subject indicates that Town Crier employees are among the worst offenders at evading local parking regulations, so I guess we shouldn't expect objective analysis.

Three things you might believe if you'd been reading the Town Crier instead of studying the last few weeks

1) Day workers sued the City of Los Altos as payback for the termination of a lease to which the city was not a party and not over an unconstitutional law forcing poor people to stand on the other side of El Camino.

2) Enabling more students to park closer to Mountain View High School will somehow reduce traffic there.

3) The South Peninsula Area Republican Coalition gets free advertising for its electioneering efforts because they are somehow newsworthy and not because the publisher founded the organization.

Meanwhile, the Daily News recently discovered that at least three Los Altos City Council members are rich.

Reprieve for apron parkers

Parking enforcement officers are delaying a plan to ticket "apron parking" in Westwood Village until the end of the spring quarter, according to an uncomfirmed report in the Daily Bruin this week.

This, of course, is a small setback for Michael Dukakis, Democratic nominee for President turned solver of local parking problems. It also, unfortunately, complicates Flexcar's plan to capitalize on the crackdown by heavily recruiting UCLA students.

Dukakis, at least, is not letting this development temper his commitment to public service. A Daily Bruin letter-writer spotted Dukakis picking up trash on his way to school this week.

At right: Dukakis overcomes reputation as soft on crime
and prepares to ticket apron parkers himself.

The Duke of Westwood

John Kerry. Al Gore. George Bush I. Jimmy Carter. You probably have have heard from these presidential runners-up recently. Some of you may even have a vague notion of what Walter Mondale and Bob Dole have been doing with their free time. Michael Dukakis is a different story.

On the night Dukakis lost the 1988 election, I echoed the chants of the audience at his concession speech by defiantly scrawling a block-letter " '92 " in pencil on the wall in my bedroom (where it still visible). But it was not to be. Dukakis did not run again, and few, outside of Massachusetts or the community of Amtrak aficionados, would ever hear from him again.

Until now. Dukakis is capping off his post-candidacy political "career" by sparring with spoiled UCLA undergrads over so-called apron parking in North Westwood Village (a college town apparently designed by 16-year olds). Apron parking, which is illegal in California, basically works like this: landlords sell tenants the right to park their cars in front of their apartments with their noses in the driveway and their butts in the street. This creates a ridiculous situation in which landlords are renting out land they don't own for illegal uses and in the process encouraging driving and creating hazards for disabled residents and pedestrians. But the police have not enforced the law out of fear of inconveniencing those students who can't be bothered to walk, bike or ride the bus the mile or so to campus.

Some students, like those on the editorial board of the Daily Bruin, say things should stay this way, because, well, no good reason, but we really want to be able to keep our cars wherever we want. Maybe it is unfair to students who are in the middle of their lease terms and are unlikely to get a rent abatement from their landlords. But that's a problem between the students and the landlords, not a reason to ignore the law and dedicate every possible square inch of Los Angeles to parking spaces. It shouldn't take a former presidential candidate to explain that.

The cheapest land in Mountain View

Q: Where you can rent space for nine months at $3 per 200 sq. feet?

A: Mountain View High School, which sells an unlimited number of parking permits to its students at the cost of printing the things. Los Altos isn't much different, charging students $20 for permits. The lots themselves cost more than that to maintain, even if you don't count the cost of building them.

I haven't done any GIS maps yet to prove it statistically (volunteers welcome), but it appears that our local high schools are giving away valuable public land to a select group of students: those whose parents can afford for them to drive. I suspect this is more visible at LAHS, which so far has been unwilling to hand over certain information that would shed light on this. The records from MVHS show at least half a dozen students who have parking permits at Mountain View despite living within half a mile of the school. Some live only a quarter mile away.

I'm not suggesting those students should be restricted from buying parking permits. It just seems something is wrong with the system when they do. Yet the school doesn't see it that way, and defends its policy of subsidizing driving while doing next to nothing for students who walk, bike or take the bus. From a recent Voice story:

"We don't have any control over that," said Superintendent Rich Fischer, who explained at a recent community meeting that schools are powerless when it comes to changing student driving habits.

Good thing he wasn't president during the Civil War, or we might still have slavery.

The High Cost of Free Parking

For one reason or another, as a junior at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts, surrounded by maple forests and brooks and family farms, I became interested in the topic of minimum off-street parking requirements in zoning bylaws. (Hey, at least it wasn't art history). As a result, I wound up reading every paper published by an obscure UCLA planning professor named Donald Shoup, who argued that such requirements -- restaurants must provide 1 space per 300 square feet and another for every employee, barbers must provide 2 spaces per barber, etc. -- were not only illogical, but a hidden subsidy that encouraged driving and drove up the cost of land.

(I thought I put together one hell of a convincing argument about an unnoticed trend in what was jokingly called "downtown" Williamstown, by the way, but I got a C+ on the project.)

Five years later, I am still a nerd, but Shoup is something of a celebrity in planning circles. He has published a book called "The High Cost of Free Parking," and today was the keynote speaker at a forum held by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. Planners and council members from all over the Bay Area were there. Shoup tore them all a new one, saying their work in the field was "astrology" and "sorcery" falsely masquerading as expertise. Put simply, his argument is that demand for a free good is always infinite, so no such formula can ever be accurate.

More details on this topic at some other, less boring time. But man was I proud of myself.