See also:
Gateway Street Parking: Why it will be inadequate
Getting rid of parking in Arcata: A social engineering experiment

Arcata’s Gateway Plan offers an improved bike lane network and safer pedestrian walkways —  both great. But it also effectively restricts and removes car ownership to an extent that perhaps is not well known. New apartments built can have zero parking spaces for the people living there. That indeed is zero – No parking spaces at all. (I use the word “apartments” because there will be no single-family homes possible in the Gateway Plan.)

So the first question is: Would you rent an apartment if it didn’t have a place to park your car?

Suppose someone wants to start a restaurant in a 1,000 square foot commercial space.

 

Under the Gateway Plan, how many parking spaces would a developer provide – for the cook, the kitchen help, the waitstaff, and 35 diners?

 

Are you ready for the answer?  There could be ZERO parking spaces.

 

And the largest number of parking spaces that are allowed to be built there? 

The Maximum number of spaces allowed by this Plan?

 

ONE parking space.

 

That would be the maximum allowed.

More crucially, there’s a maximum number of parking spaces that can be on the property. For the Hub and Corridor districts – the central portion of the Gateway area — there is a maximum of one parking place for every four apartments. Even if a developer wanted to construct more parking, it can’t be done.

In real-life terms: A building with 100 one-bedroom apartments and perhaps 125 or 150 driving-age residents would have 25 parking spaces – one for each six tenants. For a building with 20 two-bedroom apartments — conceivably over 40 people of driving age living there – there’d be a maximum of just five parking spaces allowed by this code. That is one parking space for every eight tenants.

Businesses in the Gateway Plan are hard-hit as well. A restaurant in a 1,000 square foot space might have seats for 35 or 40 diners and require a staff of six. Under the Gateway Plan, how many parking spaces would a developer provide – for the cook, the kitchen help, the waitstaff, AND the patrons? Are you ready for the answer?  There could be zero. And the largest number of parking spaces that are allowed to be built there is ONE.

These are New York City numbers, and we are not in New York City.

Without a place to park, will people say good-bye to their cars? Or will they try finding a place to park on the street. Well, that’s a problem too. In the effort of planning bulb-outs for safer pedestrian crossings and making bike lanes separated from traffic, the amount of on-street parking has been severely reduced.

As one example, on the block of Arcata between 8th & 9th Streets and between K and L Streets there are currently about 48 parking spaces. The proposed layout shown in the Draft Gateway Plan shows 28 spaces – less than 60% of what’s there now. But the draft plan is inaccurate. It does not take into account actual driveway cutouts of homes and business. After subtracting for that reality, the Gateway proposal provides just 11 spaces where currently there are 48. That is under 25% of the current on-street parking for the four sides of that block. (For further information on the lack of parking in the Gateway Plan, see Arcata1.com.)

As a principal of one of the largest local builders wrote: “I am in favor of encouraging people to use cars less, but ‘encouraging’ in this sense means providing not enough parking, so that people are essentially blocked from owning a car. Again, top down social engineering. You may encourage away, but you need to stop using that word when you mean denying people a choice.”

Given all this, what will happen? Basically, a mess. Tenants in the Gateway area will attempt to park their cars in adjacent neighborhoods to the east and west. People with children or with jobs where public transit is impractical – and older people whose bicycling days are in the past — simply will not be able to live in the Gateway area.

And thus the Gateway zone will have become exclusionary, with practices that in effect eliminate large sectors of our population. People are essentially discriminated against, for what is considered as the greater good for Arcata as a whole.

I am in favor of encouraging bicycling and walking. And I am in favor of creating more housing – provided that it’s a decent living space with a price that’s accessible to good workforce people.

But to have as a condition of supplying that housing that there can be only one parking space for every six to eight residents – that I do not care for. And my guess is that developers will feel the same way, and they simply will not build.

Included in the Mad River Union, Wednesday, March 27, 2023, as a letter to the editor.