SCVTalk.com

Vis a vis Tim’s link to an SCVNews story about the impending outrage over inconvenient parking at local high schools due to new solar panels, I can’t resist a link to an excellent LA Mag article about parking.

Dr. Donald Shoup, a Yale-trained economist, studies something no other respectable economist studies: the economics of parking. And his findings are pretty shocking.

Behold the cost we all bear for our laziness and need for convenience:

After 36 years, Shoup’s writings—usually found in obscure journals—can be reduced to a single question: What if the free and abundant parking drivers crave is about the worst thing for the life of cities? That sounds like a prescription for having the door slammed in your face; Shoup knows this too well. Parking makes people nuts. “I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain,” he says. “How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance—all these things are part of parking, and we’ve assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions. Our mental capacities just bottom out when we talk about parking.”

Nail. Meet Hammer.

In my 20 years of SCV living, I’ve found that few things piss SCVers off more than not finding convenient parking. I remember the aggression and anger (sometimes descending into fist fights) of fellow students at Hart and COC. The non-stop letters to the editor about the City’s admittedly misguided back-in parking plan. The live transformation -before your very eyes- of a genteel suburban soccer mom into a maniac gunning it through the parking lot of Westfield during the holidays.

Of course this isn’t just limited to SCVers. The article itself is all about parking in Los Angeles. But I’d argue that SCVers feel even more entitled to abundant, free, and convenient parking than anyone else in LA County. At least in LA there’s an expectation that you’ll have to pay for parking. The same is not true in Santa Clarita; indeed, we expect  free, convenient, and highly-available parking at all times and places, anything else is a license to get our pitchforks and torches and storm City Hall.

We have an upcoming City Council election. If you were to ask me how to get elected to the City Council, I’d say I have no idea. But if you were to ask me how to fail at getting elected but get more press & public attention than any of your opponents, I’d suggest you talk openly and boldly about your new plan to implement pay parking at some of the City’s more popular attractions and sites as a method to encourage alternative transportation and better land use.

Your candidacy would go down in flames (perhaps getting you an all time low vote count) but you’d live on in SCV infamy and become the hero of parking/transit geeks like me. And you might be responsible for voter turnout hitting 20 or 30%!

Speed kills. As SCVTalk has documented far too many times in the past several years, speeding on our local highway-like streets and canyon roads inevitably leads to more deaths of adults and more stumps in the Youth Memorial Grove at Central Park (84 dead young people with several more stumps on the way).

Along the same lines as the poor family that lives in Sand Canyon and has seen far too many crashes in their neighborhood, I have two ideas to combat the problem. One is rather traditional and boring and will no doubt outrage many: a massive, city-wide crackdown on speeders with coordination between Sheriff’s Deputies, the CHP, and the  city. This is admittedly a rather brutish approach to the problem, but it’s necessary nonetheless. If drivers -young and old alike- have no fear of the kinetic consequences of speeding, then they at least ought to fear getting caught speeding. It’s hard to probe the minds of Santa Claritans, but does anyone think the City’s current anti-speeding campaign (bus bench ads. Seriously. How many speeders ride the bus?) is scaring people enough to slow down?

To whatever extent possible, the city ought to establish a baseline for speeding then build some measurements into the program. Example: create speed zones around town, then start measuring. During week 1 of the crackdown in Zone 2, x number of citations were issued with Y being the percentage each driver was exceeding the speed limit by (5mph over in a 50mph zone would be 10%, for example). Week #2 saw x percentage drop-off in the amount of speeding citations and y% drop in the same zone. The Sheriff’s Department should be ruthless with the citations, and the City Council should steel their spine for in advance of the inevitable blowback.

Couple increased police enforcement with the placement of several more traffic speed monitoring devices, more automated speed/radar signs on certain high speed roads, hell even placebo police cars, and then voila! Watch as speeds decrease overtime as the perception of enforcement increases. We don’t necessarily need to start paying every Deputy overtime; all that is really needed is the perception that we’re getting tough on speeders.

The City already has an intelligent and advanced traffic information network; it’s time to augment that network and put it to use in the service of safety, not just efficient traffic flow.

Secondly, the radical but fun part: embrace the SCV’s need for speed. For whatever reason this town has a proud heritage of racing. Maybe it’s our beautiful, twisty, canyon roads, maybe the perchlorate in the water increases aggression and enhances the daredevil gene , maybe ye olde Saugus Speedway and exhaust fumes and gasoline are embedded in our consciousness…who knows?

Let’s embrace it in a controlled, practical, and fun manner by establishing Sheriff’s Department-managed, highly-controlled legal drag races.

Sounds crazy right? Not so, when you consider the National Hotrod Association has a Street Legal style racing program at tracks around the country (the nearest one is in Bakersfield or Pomona).  True, we don’t have a track, but that didn’t stop a San Diego professor from seeking out state grants and building a non-profit agency called RaceLegal that provided a “youth oriented environment in a neutral and centrally located location where we could replicate a street environment, but with safer and sanctioned conditions that insured the safety of our racers and their fans.” The group hosts 12 races every year and has seen youth speeding related deaths decline dramatically since the program was built in 1998. Here’s an example from just last year:

The idea would be to allow youths to drive their cars fast, but in a controlled and stable environment. This would not only make it safer for them, but for us. It’s been done in other communities and I’m confident that if we put our minds to it, we could do it here.

I’m admittedly somewhat of a maniac about safety on the streets. I blame two factors: almost being hit several times while riding around the SCV and this blog. I’ve been reading about crashes like the one on Tuesday for years. What’s more, I have a good memory and so each time I drive by a crash site, I’m reminded of what happened there, of the violence that accompanied driver, passengers, and innocent victims in the last moments of their life. Judging by the comments here and elsewhere I’m not the only one tired of the carnage.

The City should step up to this challenge and see if we could at least take a stab at reducing the number of speed related crashes and fatalities in our valley.