While open parking spaces become increasingly harder to find in La Jolla, many community members are weary when it comes to considering, yet again, if additional timed meters and bulky parking garages are the answer.
The La Jolla Parking District Advisory Board, which was created more than a year ago to advise the city on parking-related issues and preserve community character, met Wednesday, Nov. 15, and provided a forum for residents to voice their concerns and ideas.
Conversations between board and audience members lingered on the shortage of parking spaces during high traffic times, such as lunch and dinner hours and seasonal tourist months, and whether a resolution to the problem was foreseeable in the near future.
“With parking, it’s the free market system, and if it’s free then there will be an infinite demand,” said Martin Mosier, vice chairman of the parking advisory board.
One resident suggested that if parking costs more, then people might be motivated to use other forms of transportation, such as public buses, walking or bicycling,
La Jollan Gail Forbes said she and many others remembered when La Jolla was a slow-paced, sleepy community and on any given night a person could walk down Girard Avenue and see only a handful of people.
“Maybe we don’t want to be flooded with people,” Forbes said, in response to Mosier’s comment.
Board member Ray Weiss agreed with Forbes and stated that one of the drawbacks for expanding parking is that it would create more traffic.
Other parking problems identified were oversized vehicles, such as boats, RVs and trailers, being parked in residential areas; people parking in red-curb areas, because they are poorly painted or because motorists ignore or are unaware of the marking; inadequate signage; a shortage of short-term parking spaces for delivery trucks and a lack of parking enforcement altogether.
Reconstruction of the Bird Rock area, including devising more efficient parking strategies, is currently under way along La Jolla Boulevard. Joe LaCava, chair of the Bird Rock Community Council who was present at the meeting as a resident, suggested that Bird Rock’s issues are similar to those in La Jolla Village.
“In Bird Rock, we are focusing on making more parking available for employees and leaving the street parking for customers,” LaCava said.
Residents at the meeting agreed that many businesses in La Jolla Village did not provide enough parking for their employees, causing them to resort to parking along the streets. While those in attendance agreed that street parking should be reserved for business patrons, they also recognized that use of underground parking garages and other off-street parking is deemed undesirable, unsafe and inconvenient by most.
Advisory board members emphasized that the committee had been gathering information from the community since last November through public surveys and hoped that more residents would get involved in the process.
Tuesday’s meeting, although it was publicly announced, had only 10 residents in attendance.
LaCava pointed out that the key to getting community members interested was to find a shared interest around which they could unite.
“If you can find that common problem that everyone can relate to, that’s when people will come together,” he said.
The La Jolla Community Parking District Advisory Board is administered by Promote La Jolla and meets at 9 a.m. on the third Thursday of every month at the Athenaeum, 1008 Wall St. For more information, contact Leah Schaeffer, (858) 454-5718.