Parking Cost Will Rise in Parts of L.A. - Traffic: Longer hours and some higher rates for curbside meters begin today on the Westside and in Sherman Oaks and may spread to other areas.

The city of Los Angeles will begin today to increase the hours, and in some cases the rates, at curbside parking meters on the Westside and in Sherman Oaks in an effort to raise money for more public parking facilities.

Rising land costs, increased traffic congestion and a growing number of residents demanding permit parking on their streets have created a parking crunch in neighborhoods throughout the city that officials are struggling to resolve.

About 2,700 parking meters in hard-hit areas of the Westside and Sherman Oaks that now run until 6 p.m. will begin running until either 10 p.m. or midnight, and for the first time they will operate on Sunday--a day that had been meter-free except in tourist areas, such as Venice and Westwood Village.

Rates will remain at 50 cents an hour at most of the meters, but those along a stretch of Westwood Boulevard south of Wilshire Boulevard and those near the intersection of Robertson Boulevard and 3rd Street will cost $1. That rate, already in place in Westwood Village, is the highest in the city outside downtown Los Angeles.

The changes, which will take two months to implement, are estimated to raise revenues by an additional $1.5 million a year. City officials said they are an inevitable response to a severe, citywide parking shortage and are expected to spread to other neighborhoods. Using data from just 12 of the city’s 70 parking meter zones, the city’s Department of Transportation estimated in March that the city needs about 8,000 new parking spaces.

“It is one of the prices of urbanization,” said S. E. Rowe, general manager of the Department of Transportation. “We have to try to get ahead of the parking problem.”

The city now collects about $16 million from 38,000 meters citywide and an additional $1 million in lease payments from 19 city-owned lots. In July, the city administrative officer reported $34.3 million in the city’s parking fund.

Money in the fund--including the additional $1.5 million from the meter changes under way today--will be used to buy land, construct parking lots and garages and to strike deals with developers for public spaces in private parking garages. The Department of Transportation has a construction plan that calls for 5,000 new spaces at a cost of $93 million over the next five years.

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who proposed the meter changes, said that without the changes the city will be unable to buy land for parking in his 5th District, which wraps around the city of Beverly Hills and includes Westwood, Bel-Air and Sherman Oaks.

Yaroslavsky is interested in increasing revenue from meters in his district because funds collected in one district are rarely spent on new parking facilities in another. In many cases, council members, who control the funds collected in their districts, are even reluctant to transfer funds among communities within the same district.

“Our problem is that land values on the Westside have far outpaced our parking meter revenues,” Yaroslavsky said. “Despite the fact that we have $9 million in my district’s parking meter fund, that won’t even buy us a lot and a half on Melrose Avenue for parking.”

All 2,700 meters affected by the changes are in Yaroslavsky’s district, meaning the additional $1.5 million annually will go directly for more parking there. City transportation officials said, however, that they expect other council members to request extended hours and higher rates on their meters, too.

“Some of the same forces are operating elsewhere in the city,” Rowe said. “On-street parking is becoming more scarce just about everywhere.”

City officials said the parking crunch citywide has worsened in recent years because of dwindling curbside spaces. Growing congestion, particularly on the Westside, has forced the city to extend morning and evening no-parking restrictions on busy streets to provide additional traffic lanes. Some lanes that had been reserved exclusively for parking have been converted for traffic, and others where parking had been banned between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. now prohibit it between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.

The proliferation of so-called preferential parking districts in residential neighborhoods near commercial areas has made the matter even worse, the officials said. There are now about 30 of the districts citywide--most in the Westside--with a dozen or so added each year. The districts keep shoppers and restaurant-goers from parking on side streets by limiting parking to residents with special permits.

Parking officials will start posting new hours and rates today on meters near the Beverly Center and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Officials said it will take about two months to change all 2,700 meters, which are also located along Ventura and Van Nuys boulevards in Sherman Oaks, near the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega boulevards, Melrose Avenue, and Pico and Westwood boulevards near the Westside Pavilion.