At its June 2 meeting, the City Council voted 4-1 to approve staff’s recommendation for a 50-stall parking lot at the new Aquatic Center in Jean Sweeney Open Space Park. That’s the option we endorsed in our letter of support. Earlier iterations of the project contemplated a much larger lot, and every parking stall removed means fewer of the environmental impacts that come with paving land.
ARPD Director Long deserves credit for creatively leveraging nearby parking resources, including partnerships with the Aquatic Center’s neighbors, the College of Alameda and Bluerise Ventures. As a result, most pool users are unlikely to notice a meaningful difference in parking availability.
The project ultimately landed in a reasonable place, but the discussion gave comparatively less attention to an important question: how should parking at the Aquatic Center (and similar high-traffic community facilities) support Alameda’s goals to reduce vehicle miles traveled?
The parking analysis done by DIXON was primarily predictive. It attempted to estimate how many people would drive based on current assumptions and then determine how much parking would be needed to accommodate them. While the study evaluated parking management tools such as paid parking, shared parking, and permit programs, it largely considered them through the lens of parking supply, financial feasibility, and spillover management.
Alameda has adopted ambitious goals to reduce driving and lower transportation emissions. A study incorporating those goals would have included additional guiding principles, and explored questions like: What parking strategy best aligns with the City’s climate goals? How much could paid parking reduce vehicle trips? Rather than treating driving rates largely as a forecast, it would have explored how policy choices could help change them.
Future conversations about parking should acknowledge the tension between accommodating today’s travel patterns and shaping tomorrow’s. It’s really important to use existing pavement whenever we can (as we’re doing here), and it’s also important to align processes and decisions with our adopted transportation and climate goals. If reducing driving is truly a priority, the studies we commission need to evaluate not only how people travel today, but also how parking management can influence travel choices we want in the future.
Hopefully we’ll get better at that over time. In the meantime, we can celebrate the smaller parking lot, along with the strong set of active transportation “carrots” built into the project: bicycle parking for up to 110 bikes and secure bike lockers, including two oversized ones, direct access from the amazing Cross Alameda Trail with new connectors from surrounding neighborhoods, and program elements such as events and discounts for people arriving by bike, foot, or bus. And we can thank ARPD for this work to make it easier to take a dip without taking a car!