Trend Toward Permit Parking Districts Draws Mixed Reviews

Competition for curb-side parking spaces intensifies every day in Los Angeles, and annoyed residents are setting up districts where only those with permits may park on neighborhood streets.

The city already has set up 21 permit parking districts, 16 of them in the densely developed Westside. An increasing number are cropping up wherever business districts or universities abut residential areas.

“We’re getting more and more requests every day,” said Richard Jaramillo, transportation engineer in charge of Los Angeles’ permit parking program. He estimated that since January he has sent information to about 240 people, more than twice as many as in 1986.

Fifteen new parking districts have been proposed and the City Council will vote on four of them within the next three months.

Traffic engineers in Long Beach, Hermosa Beach, West Hollywood and other smaller cities report similar trends.

Last-Resort Measure

“People are really asking for preferential parking,” Long Beach Traffic Engineer Dick Backus said. “It’s now common knowledge that we do have such zones and a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon.”

Yet few wholeheartedly favor such districts. Many describe them as little more than a last-resort measure to keep outsiders from choking residential streets.

Even Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, father of Los Angeles’ 1979 permit parking ordinance, characterized the process as “painful.”

“Sometimes I wonder why I did it,” Yaroslavsky said. “The creation of a permit parking district is a very painful exercise for a neighborhood. . . . It’s imperfect but I don’t know a better system. You cannot make the front of somebody’s home into a virtual parking lot.”

Michaelyn Jones, an Anaheim traffic engineering investigator, said her city has established two such zones in neighborhoods around the Anaheim Convention Center and Disneyland.

“They had an extreme problem in the Disneyland area,” Jones said. “They (outsiders) were not just parking in the street; they were defecating on front lawns and leaving trash all over. They weren’t just uninvited into the area; they were rude to the neighbors when they were there.”

Tickets Cause Bad Feelings

But, Jones said, the city has since found that parking districts “really don’t work out well.” Once the district is established, cars parked without permits are cited--among them cars belonging to guests whose hosts did not obtain guest permits and to new residents who didn’t know about the restrictions. That causes some bad feelings, she said.

“Everyone thinks they want permit parking until they get it,” Jones said. “It’s an extra thing in their life, an impediment to easy living. Afterwards, they’re not really sure they like it.”

Tom Mahood, a senior civil engineer with the Orange County Environmental Management Agency, said despite occasional requests for permit parking, Orange County authorities now tend to try other means of control.

“Generally permit parking is a last-resort measure where something has gone wrong, maybe in the planning process. You’re having spillover into residential areas of nonresidential uses. Fortunately we’ve been able to avoid most of this. We don’t have that many older business districts that lack parking,” Mahood said.

He said county government has no ordinance for setting up such districts. The closest to a parking district in county territory has been issuance of permits to residents in cramped Sunset Beach that allow them to park in front of their driveways, which has been illegal.

Associations Take Action

When residents complained of a parking invasion, typically from a nearby high school, county authorities have posted parking restrictions. Typically no parking is allowed between 8 a.m. and noon, eliminating the street as useful parking for students, Mahood said.

Some south county homeowner associations have considered assuming ownership of their public streets in order to erect gates and exclude outsiders, Mahood said.

The county is amenable if the streets don’t lead to some public attraction such as a school or park because the county escapes maintenance costs, Mahood said. “But when the homeowner association finds out it’s going to cost money to maintain the streets and pay for liability insurance, they back out.”

Newport Beach, too, has been reluctant to use permit parking districts, although it has one district it considers successful. That district, on Newport Island on the west end of Newport Harbor, has existed for about four years.

Jim Brahler, Newport’s assistant traffic engineer, said the residents of the 180 or so homes on the island requested the parking district and appear happy with it.

The island has narrow streets, little space for street parking and is close enough to the beaches to tempt beachgoers to park there. It is a place, Brahler said, where permit parking makes sense.

But, he added, the City Council has refused requests from other parts of the city, even from Balboa, where beachgoers regularly swamp residential neighborhoods.

“The council seems to philosophically oppose that because permit parking would preclude even residents from other parts of our city from parking there,” Brahler said.

But Huntington Beach, which has used permit parking in three neighborhoods near its beachfront, is happy with the results.

Huntington Beach Pleased

“They seem to be working quite well,” said Bruce Gilmer, the city’s traffic engineer. Any neighborhood demonstrating that beachgoers are using parking space needed by neighbors can expect to get a permit parking district, he said. No others seem necessary at this point, he added.

Most of the districts in Southern California are concentrated on Los Angeles’ Westside. Transportation engineers have predicted that if the spate of requests keeps up, the entire Westside could become a series of permit parking districts.

Such is already the case in San Francisco, where a whole swath of the city from Telegraph Hill to Golden Gate Park is zoned for preferential parking, said Norman Bray, traffic engineer for San Francisco. Although nearly 20% of the city’s streets are already posted for permit parking, Bray predicted that within a few years preferential parking districts could extend over half of city.

“As long as our parking crunch stays the way it is, it’s just going to keep spreading to more neighborhoods,” Bray said.

Squeeze from Developments

Long Beach residents are also clamoring for permit parking. An upsurge in new developments there has led to a sharp rise in requests for preferential parking zones, said city traffic engineer Backus.

Residential homes share the streets with apartments and condominiums, worsening the parking crunch. Preferential parking zones are no solution to the dearth of on-street parking in those neighborhoods, said transportation officials.

Some critics have attacked permit parking as elitist, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that a community has the right to create preferential parking districts to reduce traffic, congestion, litter, pollution and other environmental problems. Shortly afterward, permit parking districts sprang up in Eastern cities such as Boston and Washington, along with Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Most transportation engineers emphasize that permit parking is only a short-term solution. They say the answer to parking shortages lies in increasing the number of spaces that businesses must provide.

Times staff writer Steve Emmons contributed to this story from Orange County.