http://www.joetuman.com/parking_plan?utm_campaign=parking_blast&utm_medium=email&utm_source=joetuman
It will be though because Joe comes from a Pro-Business
perspective and used that language. Just
for that there will be some “pro public” or “pro-public transit” backlash. Some of our transit advocates are in love with
the theories of Donald Shoup’s book, The High Cost of Free Parking so any advocacy
of any free parking anywhere for anyone will be opposed as some kind of social
anathema. Joe will make Allan Michaan, a
solid supporter of progressive politics in Oakland and owner of the Grand Lake
Theatre happy with some of his ideas but he will piss off the anti-free parking
crowd.
Now we will have two opposing ideas.
Joe’s plan says Free Parking = Better Retail = Better Sales
Tax Revenue.
The Shoup plans that say Free Parking = Lost Revenue =
Parking Scarcity.
Both ideas don’t really work just through the magic of the
market and the claims made don’t have a lot of research to back them up. In my view that is not possible because
bigger factors determine what happens in retail sales and public transit than
the price of a parking meter.
Nobody is going to rush down to Jack London Square because
parking is now free at certain times.
Not after the closure the Jack London Center artisan shops and the shuttering
of the Old Spaghetti Factory, El Torito, other restaurants, the big book store
and Starbucks, and other venues near the square such as Bluesville. Sometimes I wonder if the planners have ever
been on a date. People have lost a lot
of reasons to go to the square or to browse the square area if they are down
there. There needs to be some draw to go
and park there for free. The free part
was only part of the problem anyway. You
can get validation for the lot across from Jack London Cinema, and when the
movie is over, why stay?
Joe addresses the problem of the high price of tickets in
his plan. Parking hours and high fine
costs have been the hassle to avoid in Oakland.
On the other hand, 21st Century driving and shopping habits
are not just formed around parking or municipal sales tax boundaries. Someone who works in Berkley, and lives in
Oakland could well stop at the Trader Joes in Emeryville on their way home for
all kinds of reasons, including preferences, convenience, price, personal
safety, and parking.
These cross-city-lines retail purchases can be measured, and
have been measured. Oakland residents
spend a lot of their retails dollars outside of Oakland and other cities nearby
pick up those sales tax dollars. The
balance is way out of Oakland favor. We
lose a lot of tax dollars paying sales tax to other cities for their police,
their streets, and their schools. The
sales tax system is as out of date as the horse and carriage. It needs reform and equalizations should take
place on a state level distributing sales taxes allocations by number of
residents, not receipts. When I learned
how bad the sales tax system shorts Oakland I started to buy everything I can
in Oakland. I gas up before I leave
here, and if I stop at a Safeway, it is an Oakland Safeway.
Ever hear any Oakland politician talk about the sales tax
deficit? Only Wilson Riles. Yet it means more to us than all the parking
meters we could ever install.
The anti-free parking side will say that free parking will
take away from public transit.
Really? How does it take away
from transit that is not there or not there often enough to be practical? Are the parking dollars going to be used to
pay for transit? Nope, parking money is
not even earmarked for our free B buss. Note that this free buss does not quite
run to the train station, does not quite make the bus station, nor the key BART
station at MacArthur with its connections to shuttles and the Emery-go-round
and does not get to Kaiser or Allan’s Theatre.
I think it does run up and down in front of Rebeca Kaplan’s political
ambitions. http://www.meetdowntownoak.com/images/Broadway_Shuttle_Schematic.pdf
As a working man I ask WHO is parking, WHY and for HOW
LONG? There is more at stake here than
just stopping long enough to take in a movie at the Grand Lake. How about if you happen to WORK at the Grand
Lake Theatre? In all these discussions I
have heard nothing of parking set asides or transit focused on the needs of
employees. The new high cost of parking
and higher costs of tickets have fallen hard on those who can afford it least.
Working people need to do things such as get their kid back
from school. So after serving you your soya
latte they may not have time to do that without a car. Even if the work has good transit, schools,
shopping and other places people need to go, such as home, often don’t. So working people are usually forced to have
a car to have a job and to use a car to keep a job and take care of their
family. Even when they work across the
street from BART. Getting that car is
usually the first step to getting that job.
Usually the job does not include parking in central urban areas, even if
they work there.
Another cost has fallen on the working folk hardest and that
is the cost of having your car stolen by Parking Enforcement. Stolen sounds like a harsh word unless you
see how it works in practice.
Here Joe missed an opportunity to expose a scandal. Maybe he does not know. In case you do not know, it works like
this:
·
Working people get tickets for doing such things
as trying to park near work.
·
Tickets add up and don’t get paid on time.
·
The license plate of that car is put on a
list.
·
A & B Towing just takes the car if they see
a listed plate without any procedure or warning.
·
The working person then needs to go pay all the
fines in full, and the DMV also gets involved collecting any back fees they
have due. Everything needs to get paid
before the car will be released. This is
down on 7th street downtown.
·
Then the working person needs to get way out to
San Leandro Street (in an area with no transit and there is no shuttle from
where you pay the fines to where you get the car) and pay exorbitant A & B
towing and storage fees. If things are
missing from the car, well too bad.
Sometimes the car has already been sold.
·
If you give up and just let them have the car,
you only maybe get to have the contents back and only if you list them. You do not get to actually see the car.
This is only the brief version of the story. For an idea of how A & B treats working
class Oakland residents on the city’s behalf, take a look at their Yelp! Page:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/a-and-b-auto-company-oakland
http://www.yelp.com/biz/a-and-b-auto-company-oakland
So what might be a good parking plan? Well, if we want people to leave their cars,
let’s figure out where they can leave them.
Such as at home. Let’s make sure
we can use what we have now. Joe’s ideas
fit in there. Do something for the
employees, do something for the customers and take the dollar hungry aggression
out of the system. A&B should be
fired and investigated. The whole
process of impounding cars for tickets should be scrapped and the city should
collect its bills as others do without extortion.
And we really need to stand up for some equity in tax
collection. It is complicated, but
reform is needed and that only happens when reform is demanded. City Council should demand reform. The state
tax systems short Oakland in a couple of key ways. Sales tax being one, school funding being
another, and before we waste time squabbling over parking dollars we should
raise hell over millions of dollars that should come to us via better
equalization. Local government has
control over some of the sales tax, and that will be complicated and difficult
to figure out. Not figuring it out is costing
us bank.
Of course we need to be spending on transit. Not the chump change out of parking meter,
but way more than that. Regions with
good transit spend on infrastructure.
Without a regional transit authority with any authority or much in the way
of regional government, we will find that complicated too. The longest journey starts with a single step
and that step is a deep commitment to transit.
City Council should be on the tails of AC Transit and BART and every
other transit agency riding them for better results. The B bus is probably not a good idea if it
does not fill the gaps between BART, AMTRACK, Greyhound and the other shuttles,
but it is a great idea if it ever does.
Demanding better service out of AC Transit should be something Oakland
City Council does every day until we get it.
Now for a personal story.
In 2010 I met Allan and some business owners from the Grand Lake area
when Jean Quan, then council finance committee chair, decided to jack up the
parking rates and expand the fines. This
was at the same budget where she cut funding to our 80 newest police
officers. Her take on the parking was
that if we opposed her plan, we needed to come up with the money some other
way.
I asked “How much money?” without much answer and then filed
a public information request.
Eventually I got an answer from the Administrator’s office that had big
holes in it. It did not tell us how much
money because some was with the city and some with the Police. At one point they had the same number as the
Gross and the Net. So, I don’t really
know how much we Oaklanders make out of the parking system after costs. I do know that it is a good business for the
outside contractor that does it for us.
My questions on how many cars get towed, how many confiscated, how many
returned and how much A&B makes off the deal were referred to the Police as
if the Police was separate from the City.
The police sent me back to the same process that I used to file the
first request. I got stonewalled.
I came out against the rate increases mostly for how badly
they hurt the employees of city businesses.
I was not in favor of the free parking, but that was overlooked by some
of the on-line know it all’s. I also
found that some lefty-greens did in fact feel that any increase in parking
meters was good and any opposition to it was to be anti-transit. Some did not seem to care much how badly the
new regulations were hurting working people.
There were class and color lines here and it was ugly.
To add insult to injury, the city also came out with a plan
(now scrapped) to spend 1.9 million dollars for a bike path down 40th
street (my street) that would be unsafe and cause us to tear out our meridian
gardens. In these gardens volunteer
Frank Snapp and his friends have put in over a decade of work. Community voices asked for the bike path on a
smaller side street, such as 42nd.
We now have a Green stripe and as I understand it, the whole reason for
the bike lane stuff was really to get repaving money. So it was sold to us as being pro-bike, but
it was really for auto road repair.
One blogger called me the Green who was Anti-Transit and
Anti-Bike. I suggest you keep this story
in mind when you hear shallow, cheap characterizations of people running for
office.
A short time after that election a homeless woman was kicked
out of her car in the middle of the night, in the rain, by the Oakland Police
so A & B towing could take her car and leave her with some of her stuff
living under a phone pole across the street from my home. I seriously wonder about the values of the
police officer and the tow truck driver, both of whom could have declined to
take that car, and the values of our community that allows such cruelty in the
name of tax collection.
There is a lot more at stake here than parking Joe.
