Gold Line rider feels effects of parking meter rate hike

As many readers are keenly aware, the Los Angeles City Council  last year raised its parking meter rates across town, with no meters excluded from the hike. The number of hours that many meters had to be plugged also was expanded. The move is expected to bring the city $18 million extra annually.

That's the background leading up to an interesting e-mail I received from a reader named Bob Thomas who had a beef involving the city parking lots next to the Gold Line station in Highland Park. Whereas motorists used to be able to park for a day for $2 at the 10-hour meters in the lots, the cost is now $4.

That means that riders planning on using the Gold Line to go to work must spend $4 a day for parking plus $2.50 for a roundtrip or $5 for a day pass if they need to transfer to another train or bus (it's much less if they have a weekly or monthly pass). That's $6.50 for a 15-minute train ride to Union Station or $9 for anywhere else.

The problem: If the goal is to get people out of cars, is that really much of a savings over driving? Particularly to downtown?

"It's just typical of government to set forth a policy without thinking through all the unintended consequences," Thomas wrote in an an e-mail. "In this case, perhaps someone did and decided that the pros outweighed the cons but I find it typical of an attitude that always seems to put public transit at the bottom of the pecking order."

With that in mind, I called Councilman Ed Reyes, who represents Highland Park, and asked him if it also seemed to him that charging $4 to park at a mass transit station seemed counter-productive. Reyes -- as he has said before publicly -- quickly agreed that the Council blew it with the meter rate hikes. The problem, in his view, is that there are some cases where cheaper parking is needed to accomplish goals such as propping up emerging business areas or encouraging transit use.

Reyes started by saying how he got an earful and then some at a recent community meeting in Lincoln Heights. "If they could have hung me in effigy, they would have," Reyes said. "I spent a half-hour apologizing for the stupidity of this."

So why did he vote for it?

"I did because of the way it was put forth to us -- it was a knee-jerk reaction to a $400-million budget deficit and we were looking for ways to create revenue," Reyes said. "I did not look at the complexity of this impact."

In early January, Reyes authored a motion asking city officials to reexamine the rate hikes and to see if there is a way rate hikes' effect could be measured. He's not against rating some meter rates but said that the more dramatic hikes should have been phased in and that there should be a policy governing which meters get an increase and which do not.

As for Thomas, I spoke to him Friday afternoon and he says that he's seeing more cars parked in the residential neighborhood near the Highland Park station where there are no meters or time limits for parking. On Friday at 10 a.m., he counted zero cars at the 10-hour meters. "I wonder," Thomas said, "if they're making any more money than before."

RELATED: Here's a link to another Times story  about the impact of the meter changes.

-- Steve Hymon

Comments

[LAofAnaheim]

I think of a parking meter hike a way to discourage driving. Maybe that person should consider buying the $5 day pass and taking the bus to the Metro station instead of driving.

[Rich]

Sure, the people that take the train could drive into Downtown and they may spend less money on gas than a train ticket... but what about parking costs in Downtown? It's still probably cheaper to ride the Gold Line.

[M]

As a reply to some of the comments:

-In some instances, people get compensated from their work for using alternative forms of transportation. The employers give the individual the money that would have been spent on a parking spot for them, say in downtown, for their public transportation costs. If companies are small enough though, the employers do NOT have to offer the exchange of a parking spot for cash. Other companies just seem to offer some amount of money for using alternative transportation without taking away paid parking privileges. In some of these situations they math might work in favor of the increasing parking fees at the train station, in others, maybe not.

-Sometimes if someone is going to get on a bus to get to the train station, they might as well just take a bus the whole way and completely skip the train altogether. Transfers can take up an insane amount of time. Not sure how that helps in the long run for Gold Line ridership or for parking meter profits.

-Adding infrastructure for bicycles might help a little, but not on the days when it's raining. I'm also not familiar with the safety of all of the affected neighborhoods, but I can understand that in some instances people might feel more comfortable driving to the train station opposed to getting on a bus or walking. They also might not have a reasonable public transportation route to get to the train station.

Not to say I am making excuses for either side, but really I think this all does keep on coming back to the idea that this needs to be better thought out. If you expect people to take the buses to the train station, there needs to be enough buses going to there from the places people were driving. If you expect people to bike, there needs to be good bike parking (I think there is only 1 set of bike lockers at the Highland Park station) and adequate bike paths to get to the station from the needed directions. If you expect people to pay more, you might want to get some info on how the current users are paying for their parking/what their employer contributes to see if you are just going to scare them off from using the meters.

[S.S. Sam Taylor]

I love how the real cost of driving disappears when there is a story like this. I get reimbursed at the rate of 58.5 cents per mile. So, if the Gold Line trip is portal to portal 20 miles, you are looking at a real direct cost of $11.70 plus parking. Real downtown parking can run $10-$28. So, what about this $2 increase? You could buy a Metro monthly pass and pay $2.07 per day for all the bus and rail service you need. And, please don't try to tell me that the car insurance is a sunk cost. What about your homeowners, life and health insurance. This is just a cost of living in the big city.

[Scott Mercer]

The guy should be taking a bus to the Highland Park Gold Line station, not driving. Or he can walk there or take a bicycle.

If the whole idea of public transit is to get people out of their cars, then this idiot is the party that is screwing up that idea, not the city. Raising parking rates is the perfect way to get people to stop driving everywhere! In my mind, the rates have not been raised enough.

How dare this guy put forth this complaint.

[Simon]

Baby steps.

My dad has three times tried to take the subway. Twice, he didn't because there was no parking, and once, he took it, and blah blah stuck in tunnel for a half hour.

Now the last part is obviously a fluke, but the first part does matter. Yes, it's not ideal to have people dependent on driving their cars to train stations instead of busing, but LA does not have the type of public transit system that can turn up its nose at that type of commuter. The BART system in San Francisco is hugely successful, and a big reason is that in suburbs like Pleasanton there are big, ugly stations with big, ugly cheap parking lots.

We need more parking at stations because we need more people riding the trains, and later, when we've actually got riders, then we can start using parking prices to encourage busing.