 Testing. All right, good evening, everyone. Welcome to the December 2017 Davis Futures Forum. We have a really great speaker this evening. I will talk right into the mic. I'm not sure that the mic seems on, I believe it's on. We have seen over the course of the past, oh, probably year and a half at this point, a wide range of series and speakers that ranging from Joe Monacozi, Chuck Morone, Daniel Parolek talking about form-based codes, Robert Liberty, all bringing their expertise in urban planning and urban, and new urbanism methods to hear to Davis. We are really, really fortunate. I think I want to just do a quick special moment of appreciation and shout out to two individuals. There's been a variety of folks who are involved in the Davis Futures Forum, but specifically Judy Corbett and Alan Hirsch, I think are deserving of a round of applause for their, so we've had all of these really excellent speakers over the course of the past year and a half. Tonight is no exception. Jeff Tumlin, our speaker this evening, is director of strategy for Nelson Nygaard, a world-renowned firm. He's an expert in helping communities move from discord to agreement about the future. There've obviously been, I think it's pretty timely conversation this evening. We will first, of course, hear from Jeff. We will also then, there'll be a panel moderated, excuse me, by Mayor Pro Tem Brett Lee afterwards, and then of course we'll have some time for Q&A. So a little bit more about Jeff. For the past 20 years, Jeff has led award-winning plans in cities from Seattle to Vancouver to Moscow to Abu Dhabi. He, and then here he is in Davis this evening. So we, you know, we fit right in there. Exactly. Much warmer. Yes, exactly. He helps balance all modes of transportation in complex places to achieve a community's wider goals and best utilize their limited resources. I think we'll hear obviously quite a bit about parking this evening. He is renowned for helping people define what they value in building consensus on complex and controversial projects. He provides residents and stakeholders the tools they need to evaluate their transportation investments in the context of achieving their long-term goals. He also understands that managing parking in transportation demand is a critical tool for revitalizing city centers and creating sustainable places. And actually, if I'm not mistaken, Nelson Nygaard, the firm is a one of the member of the consulting team for our new and our sort of upcoming updated downtown core area specific plan. So tonight, I think we can expect from Jeff sharing his insights regarding how demographic changes and technological innovations are modifying the rules of the transportation game. I think we can expect as well that his talk will give us ideas for how to make our downtown the jewel of this community a more economically successful, environmentally sound and enjoyable place to live, work and play. With that, Jeff Tumlin. Thank you. So as Lucas already said, I'm not a part of the downtown team. I'm also not being paid to be here, which gives me some freedom to be a little bit more outrageous and provocative than I might otherwise be if I were actually working for the city. And there's no more fun topic in urban planning to be provocative around than parking. It drives people crazy. I love going around and working on parking where it makes like my tea party people become stalwart government interventionalists. It turns my libertarian clients into Soviet communists. And it turns my, you know, bleeding heart liberal clients into people who worry about where the poor people will park if we think differently about parking. It, as Don Choup writes, all thinking about parking occurs in the reptilian cortex of the brain. And I have some theories about why this is and I may get into that a little bit later at living. But let's talk a little bit about parking because it's so tied to every good and bad thing that we try to do with cities. And it's so not evaluated. It's connected to everything that we do. Right, and so I, you know, I was born in Los Angeles. I got my driver's license on the morning of the day of my 16th birthday and saved all my money to buy a car when I was 17, right? I love driving. And as a motorist, right, there's few things that I love more than a free, empty parking space, like right in front of me, right? It's glorious. Look at all of that parking, right? Oh, so satisfying, right? And yet, I, you know, I'm also a city planner. I ran the Oakland Department of Transportation for about nine months last year. And I'm also concerned. Yeah, that's a whole other story. Oh yeah, I'm also concerned about like how we allocate limited resources, right? So while I love having empty parking spaces, I know that every parking space that's sitting unused is at least $30,000 that we've just thrown away, right? And that's generous in terms of what it costs to build parking, like building a parking structure on a surface parking lot in a place like downtown Davis, you could expect probably $70,000 per net new space in order to make your motorists happy. Like I'm in favor of happiness, but I wonder if there's something else that we might do with that money, right? And when we look at the sum total of how we regulate parking, right? You're fortunate here in Davis that you do have this wonderful walkable little downtown. But you know, you're kind of facing the same cognitive dissonance outside your downtown and even to a certain degree within your downtown on parking. So this is how America is regulated, right? And this happens to be in the Bay Area, but it could kind of be anywhere. This could be Vacaville, this could be Folsom, right? And this is mixed use zoning, right? This is a mixed use place. It meets the mixed use walkable ideal in this community's code, because there's a hotel and there's some residential, here's some office, here's some restaurants and a supermarket, right? But if you work there and you want to go to lunch at this restaurant here, which is across the street, you're gonna get in your car and drive across the street in order to go to lunch, because each of these businesses met its minimum parking requirement, right? The way we seek to please every motorist by providing at least one, probably a whole bunch of empty front door parking spaces at the front door of every single land use at all times of day, is to require driving for every trip and to deny the opportunity for people who may want to walk or bike or take transit. It also has other consequences. So parking is a critical component of housing affordability. We know that for every parking space you add to a residential unit, it increases the price of that unit by about 15 to 25%, and it decreases the number of units that you could build on a typical parcel, also by about 15 to 25%. We know from the location-efficient mortgage program at Fannie Mae that for every car your household can get rid of, that means you can afford an additional $100,000 in mortgage. It costs about $7,000 a year, according to AAA, simply to own a car. That adds up a lot, right? A parking space also takes up about 300 square feet, like if you include a portion of the dry vial. 300 square feet is the size of a reasonable studio apartment, and in a parking structure, it doesn't cost quite as much to build a studio apartment as it does, or it doesn't cost quite as much to build a structured parking space as a studio apartment because the finishes are better, but it's comparable, right? So here in the United States, by law, by government intervention, we require a minimum of five housing units for every car in America, and yet we do not have requirements for housing people. And of course, all of that housing for cars, because it's oversupplied, must be provided for free. We know generally speaking out there in the rental market that every parking space added to rental housing increases the rents by an average of $225 a month. We know also that mobility is various a lot by ethnicity and by income. Low-income African-Americans own a lot fewer cars than affluent white people. And if you're assuming that your minimum parking requirements are aimed at your most affluent white people, you're requiring that everyone pay for parking that is mostly benefiting your most affluent members of society. Parking force is also deeply tied to traffic congestion. Why in communities do we legally require more parking spaces than we have roadway capacity to actually access those parking spaces? Let alone manage your parking supply, like downtown Davis, where the expectation is that people are gonna drive around in circles for 15 or 20 minutes before they can actually find a parking space, right? Congestion operates at about a 10% margin. So as volume increases and you approach the capacity of a road, the difference between pretty much free-flow conditions and severe congestion is just an additional 10% more cars. Therefore, if you eliminate 10% of cars, no matter how congested things are, traffic will flow smoothly again. I don't have any data about downtown Davis, but in other downtowns where we've done surveying, about 30% of the traffic in a typical successful mixed-use downtown is people driving around in circles trying to find a parking space, right? So mismanaging parking to make it difficult to find a space is a leading cause of traffic congestion, I would guess in this community like many others. But a big part of the reason why we're so irrational on this peculiar topic is the psychology of parking and the psychology of driving, right? When you're employee of the month, right? You don't get a raise. You get the front door parking space because there is no better symbol of status, right? Than that reserved space right at the front door. And this is true throughout popular culture. In film, dating back all the way to the 1950s, right? A Hitchcock blonde always parks right in front of wherever it is that she's going, right? Because somebody of that status gets front door parking, right? She's a VIP. And there's also this sort of whole weirdness around people who are otherwise very kind and neighborly and think of the common good who genuinely believe that the public street in front of their house is an extension of their private property, right? Parking in front of my house, no, no, that's my parking space in the public realm in the publicly owned street, right? And this parking space, I can't store my couch there, right? I couldn't rent a storage unit and keep my Christmas ornaments there during the rest of the year. I can't even park my boat there, but I can park this giant metal box called a car. That's okay on public land for free, subsidized by the people of your community. Like somehow or another, there's something weird about this unique commodity that we treat differently than anything else. And it also, like, we get really uncomfortable. Like, I mean, how many of you have done something while in a car or when thinking about parking? That is, like, you would never do in any other context. I mean, while driving, the number of times I've endangered myself and my loved ones and other people on the road, and the times that I've gotten so angry over a friggin' parking space and done something anti-social that I would have never done in any other context, right? There's this sense of entitlement that parking breeds in us. It appeals to our most reptilian territorial brainstem unlike anything else, including our own home. But we also observe, and I'll get into this later as well, that attitudes about parking are changing. My generation was really the last generation that believed it when the automobile television commercials told us that owning our own car would bring us freedom and autonomy and social status and sex, right? You know, I believed it, you know, which is why, like, I got my car on my 16th birthday. You know, younger people, however, know that there is a commodity that brings them all of those things, right? And it's the one thing that you can't use while driving. So there's this sort of attitudinal shift that's occurring that's allowing for more rationality to enter our discussions about parking. But in the meantime, getting from totally irrational, un-evaluated, you know, reptilian management approaches for parking to something that's a little bit more productive, right? Getting from where we are now to a more rational system of regulation and management, that process is going to drive you crazy. There is arguably no more difficult sort of topic to bring up in public than parking, like, you know, off-leash dogs or homelessness, or like, these are easy topics compared to parking. And so I'm so excited that your community is actually gonna be starting to ask some of these questions of itself. So the rest of the presentation is some things for you all to think about. You know, I don't have an opinion necessarily. It's all up to you. Well, I do have an opinion, but it is still all up to you because we operate in a democracy. Something that I keep reminding myself that I really do support. Like, this is good. But it's also amazing. Like, look, like, why are you people even here? Like, we're talking about parking on a Wednesday night in a full auditorium in Davis. Like, I seriously have no idea why you all are here, but I'll keep talking. So, a place to start the conversation about rational parking management is really with residential parking permits. And this is a kind of complicated topic. The only reason why government intervenes in this unique commodity is to protect against fear of what we call spillover parking. So government doesn't regulate the number of closets that must be built in any home. Government only regulates the number of parking spaces that are associated with the union. Like, there's this one kind of storage where we're terrified that developers would forget to provide if we didn't tell them exactly the number of spaces. Like, developers are really sophisticated. They kind of actually know the market for their commodity and will likely provide the right number. But we have a deep fear in this country that somebody else might park in front of my house or somebody else might park in front of my business. Therefore, every other building in my community has to provide the absolute maximum number of parking spaces to meet whatever worst case scenario level of demand. So there's this fear of spillover parking demand that you have to address and recognize is real. I mean, whether it's rational or not doesn't matter because people who are afraid of spillover will get in the way of the political process and that fear needs to be addressed. And one way to do that is through residential parking permit districts in your residential neighborhoods. You already have these around the university, right? You know how to do this, right? So there are smarter ways of doing residential permits, including really focusing on your single-family home neighborhoods and having the permit boundaries actually follow your zoning boundaries so that you have a different approach in your walkable mixed-use areas as you do in your single-family home neighborhoods. You want to pander to your NIMBY single-family home residents. They have a lot of political power and their fears are genuine. This residential parking permits are anti-democratic and anti-market but a necessary intervention in order to be able to have a grown-up conversation in the rest of your city. Go ahead and do it. And also do things like deed restrict people moving into the new places from ever being able to acquire a residential permit. So here in California, we are masters of taxing the future to preserve the entitlements of people who are here now. We can keep doing that on this topic in order to move the ball forward through use of residential permits. Keep in mind that the typical way of running residential permits, the price of the permit is limited to the cost of managing the program. So at a certain point, if you give away or sell more permits than there are spaces out there, that the permit is just a hunting license, right? But it does prevent people from the other land uses for being able to park on your residential streets. The next thing to do is to recognize that in parking, technology is your friend. The number of cities that I've worked in that still are using 1947 technology for charging for parking, like right where I have to carry quarters on my person, like in order to legally be able to park and shop in this community, right? I mean, any business in your downtown only accepted quarters or only accepted exact change in cash, like they would quickly go out of business. The only reason one should ever charge for parking is for a customer service reason. The reason we charge for parking is not because we are evil, money-grubbing bastards. The reason we charge for parking is so that customers can always find a space, right? Parking charges are an extension of your customer attraction, your customer service strategy. And so you need to use technology in order to make it welcoming, make it really, really easy to pay. So if you're gonna be charging for parking, you need to make sure that the parking meters take credit cards, like something that I actually carry with me. And fortunately, the price of this technology has plummeted, there's no excuse for not using modern technology. And to always, in everything that you do with parking, put customers first. And I can't emphasize this enough. Many cities make the mistake of having parking and parking charges be a police or a regulatory function, right? And so you go, you drive into a community, first you have to find quarters, you find quarters, and now you're tested, right? You have to guess how long you're planning to stay, right? If you guess too high and you spend too much, you're now a dupe, right? You've just wasted money. If you guess too low and you end up being happier with downtown Davis than you thought and spending a longer time and spending more money or your date goes better than you expected, now you have literally been criminalized for guessing too low. This is a stupid choice. Your parking meter strategy needs to be oriented around customers, so not only do you need to make it easy to pay, but you need to make it easy to guess or be refunded. So many cities have basically started giving up on conventional parking meters and use techniques like pay by cell phone where you get a text message asking if you'd like more time, right? Just really basic stuff. The other thing to keep in mind is that it is always cheaper to invest in smart technology to help motorists find the existing empty spaces of which I'm sure you've got hundreds in this community. It's always cheaper to help motorists find your existing empty spaces than it is to build new spaces. So use technology in order to track where this incredibly expensive asset lies and then use technology and wayfinding to help match up motorists with available parking, right? If it's gonna cost you like 30 to $80,000 to build a parking space, you can invest in a lot of technology just to help people find the existing empty spaces of which there are many, no one can find them, though. Point number four, and this is a really important one, and that is to charge the right price for parking. If you were thinking of parking as a sort of regulatory function or a revenue function or a punishing evil motorist function because people who drive cars are destroying the planet, right? You're gonna end up with a mess. The reason we charge for parking is to ensure that motorists can find an empty space where they want, when they want. And what this means is the price of parking is gonna vary significantly geographically. It will also vary by time of day. So this is a little parking map for tiny little downtown Redwood City, California, the first place in the country that actually got smart about parking. And in Redwood City, it's 50 cents an hour in the core of the downtown and 25 cents an hour a little bit further out and at the big underutilized garage at the edge, parking is free. The right price for parking is always the lowest price that achieves an availability target of about 15% on every block and every parking lot and every garage at all times of day. The right price for parking is always the lowest price that makes sure that a motorist can quickly find a parking space wherever she is and allows people to make choices, particularly employees. Like for an employee, it's gonna save a lot for that employee to walk three blocks away to park free in the county garage rather than parking in front of the business across the street. Pretty simple stuff and yet super complicated for cities all over the country. This also means that if the point of charging for parking is to ensure availability that you need to charge for the right time of day, right? We've established in many cities, parking meter hours that correspond with the convenience of the enforcement agents who work from nine to five and who are off on Sundays, right? Most cities who provide free parking on Sundays do that because they haven't updated their parking policies since 1957 when stores were closed on Sundays. So if you have an evening restaurant and entertainment district where your parking demand is peaking at night, that's when you need to charge for parking. It's okay to provide free parking during the day and charge for parking at night if that's the thing that helps you meet your customer service goal. Here in, this is downtown Pasadena, California, very, very long history of being smart about parking and they charge for parking until midnight on Friday and Saturday nights because that is when their peak parking demand is for their bars and restaurants and the businesses there demanded it because they knew that that was how their commercial district was gonna be successful and to compete against the horrible shopping mall down the freeway. Downtown Pasadena realized their competition was not around abundant and free parking. Their competition was being a walkable, interesting, compelling, mixed-use place and that their weakness was in the perception of a lack of availability of parking and they solved that by getting the price right and getting the time of day orientation right and they did a step better than that which was to take the net revenue from their parking meters and invest it in improvements in the downtown. So in downtown, old town Pasadena, they steam clean the sidewalks every day. They take their parking meter revenue and invest that in programs and signage and holiday promotions and shuttle services that make the downtown more attractive, right? Phenomenal success and the economic performance of old town Pasadena which was nearly completely dead when I was growing up in Southern California, the economic performance of old town Pasadena has now far outstripped all of the other retail centers for the entire region that surrounds Pasadena. It's extraordinary success. Other things to think about. Your parking spaces don't have to be parking spaces. This happens to be downtown Mountain View, California. And in Mountain View, the city lets merchants commandeer the parking spaces in front of their stores to put out outdoor seating. Some of the restaurants have their seating set up 24 seven. Others that are just lunchtime restaurants put the tables out at lunch and then pull them back in in the afternoon and the restaurant owners simply contribute the lost meter revenue to the city. Some of these restaurants have seen a tripling in their revenue because of the attractiveness of this outdoor seating. In a little Main Street downtown like this, what drives the economics of little Main Street downtown is the sense of conviviality of place. Like we're tribal social primates, nothing attracts us more than other people. Like we don't go to downtowns to buy commodity goods. We order that on Amazon. We go to downtowns because they're sociable. And so thinking about your parking as a means of driving the sociability of place is also an extraordinary investment strategy. So once you have some basic management in place, you no longer need to over-regulate the development market and force developers to build more parking than the market would warrant. Again, the only reason we have minimum parking requirements is to avoid managing public on-street parking. That's it. It serves minimum parking requirements serve only one function. And that is to allow us to avoid managing the curb. We can just let the curb fend for itself. Once we manage the curb, then we can start thinking differently about parking, including maybe we don't actually need minimum parking requirements at all. Developers actually know the right number of parking spaces to build for their market. Government forces a one-size-fits-all approach on all development, even though developers may be targeting different markets. So government assumes that all people are exactly the same. In fact, even in a community like Davis, this is a relatively small town. There's surprisingly low automobile ownership rate in a city like Davis, in part because of the demographics, but also because it's very walkable. And there are a lot of older adults who are less interested in having multiple cards. Your zoning code doesn't allow for those people. Your zoning code assumes that everyone is a 35-year-old couple of median income. So why not think about letting go of this peculiar aspect of the zoning code? Particularly given how irrational your current zoning code is, right? You can tell, based on looking into the actual code, that it probably hasn't been updated since I don't know, maybe the 60s. Like, your code, and I quote, requires five parking spaces for each alley in a bowling alley. There's very specific requirements for funeral homes and mortuaries and other obscure land uses. But my favorite was that for a neighborhood shopping center, a neighborhood shopping center, something that's in the neighborhood like a convenience market in the neighborhood, something that you could walk to, the parking requirements that is expressed as three and one-half square feet of parking for each one square foot of gross floor area, meaning there needs to be three and a half times as much land area set aside for a neighborhood convenience market than there is the market itself. And you wonder, like, why the rest of your town isn't as walkable and lovely as your downtown. It's because it's illegal for the rest of your community to be walkable. And these requirements are not based upon anything. There was no local data collection for your local bowling alleys to figure out, well here in Davis actually, it's 2.1 parking spaces according to our surveys. No, this data is pulled from the ITE, Parking Generation Manual, which is driven by data from Florida in the 1970s. And when you go and you actually look at the detailed data sheets, so this is fast food restaurant with drive-in window and you have this requirement in your code. You look at the data and these are data points that were gathered randomly from all over the country. 100% of the data in the ITE manual, and it says this at the beginning, is from unwalkable isolated single uses out in the middle of nowhere. All of the data is that because they're looking at the worst case scenario level of parking demand. And this is the observed peak parking demand and this is square foot of land use. And look at the data. There's no correlation between the size of the fast food restaurant and the parking demand, none whatsoever. And yet, oh, let's look. The average parking rate that is observed is 9.95 spaces per thousand square feet, not 10, right? There is not even a single significant digit in this equation and yet it's reported at three significant digits, right? This is, it's complete madness. So other studies have sort of recognized, okay, so there's no rational basis whatsoever for all this technical requirement that's in our code. So like, can we, but we're too nervous, like the developers will run amok and there'll be no parking anywhere and it'll be scary and disastrous. And so there's the sort of methadone approach, right? For dealing with your parking regulation addiction, which is just varying your parking requirements a little bit, realizing that parking demand varies far more by location than it does by land use type. So places that are walkable or places that are mixed use or places that are mixed income have far lower parking demand rates than affluent, low density, auto dependent stuff at the edge, right? So, you know, make some adjustments and recognize that geography matters a lot. But increasingly what we're finding is cities are realizing that minimum parking requirements only create significant harm. Yep, they allow you to avoid managing your curbside space but minimum parking requirements result in traffic congestion, they result in housing affordability problems, they result in air pollution and CO2 problems, they result in a lack of walkability or bikeability, they increase costs, they drive poor performance in the economy, they do a lot of bad things and really nothing of substance that is good. And so increasingly cities like Fayetteville, Arkansas and Buffalo, New York have completely eliminated minimum parking requirements city-wide. And other cities are using parking maximums as a tool for achieving actual social good. So recognizing that we shouldn't let developers build any more parking than we have roadway capacity in order to receive that parking. Recognizing that you're gonna have far more good at achieving your housing affordability goals by establishing parking maximums than you will through your inclusionary zoning policies. San Francisco many years ago recognized that establishing very low parking maximums for residential production not only could help deliver more units and more affordable units but could also help prevent displacement because the suburban yuppies would come invade every neighborhood except those where there wasn't a place to park their SUV, right? So San Francisco had, it was very easy for developers in San Francisco to sell or lease units that had no parking but there was a significant discount on that and it attracted a different demographic than the folks who were demanding parking. So think about using the full array of parking regulatory and management tools in order to achieve your particular goals here in Davis very different place than San Francisco but a place that should have a more sophisticated conversation about how it is using parking. Other things that are important to consider are like if you're gonna build parking, don't make it hideous. You and Davis have the luxury of having a solid economy like not a boomer bust economy but a solid economy there is no excuse for allowing developers to damage the walkability of this town simply to accommodate more car parking. And there's no reason that garages can't be beautiful, right? They're just a building. It is possible to design them well. So this is in downtown Walnut Creek that's a Tiffany's in a parking structure, right? It doesn't need to look like a hideous concrete monstrosity. Also be very cautious about how you locate garage doors and driveways. Here's an example of a residential project that met its minimum parking requirement but resulted simply in taking public parking on street and converting that into private parking off street. This wiped out as many public parking spaces as it created plus it created a miserable frontage. Other things to think about and increasingly we're seeing this happen even in smaller communities where the code requires that the price of parking be unbundled from the price of housing and of commercial leases. So if you have a two parking space requirement per housing unit, right? Everyone gets two parking spaces regardless of how many cars they have. So somebody with one car has to pay for a parking space that they don't need and somebody with three cars has an extra car that they don't have a place to put. So many cities require the developers separate the price of these goods. Yep, you can build parking but you've got to price that separately which rewards households who have fewer cars with more affordable housing and accommodates households that have many cars, right? You'd think that this would be pretty logical but it's a step that many places skip and indeed you can require it. Other things that communities are increasingly doing if you have a minimum parking requirement or even if you don't, encouraging rather than forbidding more space-efficient uses of your garages. So allowing for tandem and stack and valet parking. In most parking codes, it requires that every individual space be individually accessible and therefore stuff like this is not allowed because cars are more important than people. Encouraging car sharing programs is also very important. The results vary from community to community but every zip car or neighborhood car share vehicle that you put out on the street or in a garage tends to eliminate between seven and 25 private vehicles. We're seeing this particularly true among younger adults who need to use a car occasionally but don't need to drive to work every day. Like, if you're not needing to drive to work every day it's gonna make a lot more sense to simply rent a car when you need one rather than buying and ensuring a car and having to park it and store it, right? So supporting those programs and encouraging them is a good step. Of course, in addition to establishing your residential permit programs, be smarter about them including reforming some of your existing rules. Hoboken, New Jersey is a really interesting example where Hoboken had 9,000 on-street parking spaces in the entire city and sold 17,536 residential parking permits, right? A program that was not achieving its goals and made people upset. So what Hoboken did was they skillfully located shared neighborhood cars throughout the city basically within a three minute walk of 90% of their residents and then established a program where they rewarded people who gave up their residential permit with two years of corner car membership and a bus pass and rental car discounts and a whole bunch of other goodies just to bring supply and demand back into balance and to reward people who were just storing a car on the street that they weren't really using, right? You know, it's something that I do. I still own my car, I hardly ever use it because it's pointless. And so, you know, the results were reasonably good. Obviously, they didn't solve their entire problem but they certainly achieved the success that they were looking for in expanding mobility to all of their residents and reducing automobile dependency at the same time. Now, pulling all this together, one of the things that we encourage really all communities to do but particularly places that have a successful downtown or main street is to think about what we call park once environments. So that is, you know, you're actually really fortunate here because of the history of your planning in Davis. This is some horrible arterial. Let's say this is in Vacaville. And in Vacaville, you know, Vacaville has each of its land uses and they've got their minimum parking requirements for each land use and you notice the parking lot is bigger than the building because that's what's required in every city's code and this is sort of a life of any resident. So in a very hypothetical and geographically constrained way but so you drive your daughter to school and you park and drop her off and then you go and you go to work and you park there at work and then you've got to go and you've got to take your daughter to soccer practice because of course she can't walk across the horrible arterial so that requires another parking space and then you go and you do some shopping and then you pick your daughter up and then you go home, right? And this is, you know, like obviously this is very compressed. You'd be lucky to have this sort of a commute but this is like daily life for most Americans. Lots of driving, lots of parking, lots of turning movements off of the big arterial, lots of horrible congestion. Now imagine if you had that same arterial and you had a grid of streets like you have in downtown Davis and instead of orienting your buildings along their arterial you oriented them along Main Street and you put the parking in the back and you shared the parking because the shopping and work parking demands they peak at opposite times of day so you can share and have less and then you have the same trip. So you drive and you park in the shared lot around the back and your daughter gets herself to school while you go to work and now she can get herself to soccer practice because she doesn't have to cross the horrible arterial and you can run your errands at your lunch break and you can meet at the car and you can go home. And again, obviously grossly oversimplified but the exact same array of land uses but very different performance simply by thinking differently about parking. So this arrangement takes up, it requires half of the parking as the other one and again, we're not assuming there's no transit in this. This is just parking once rather than parking six times. So half of the parking area or massive financial savings, about half the land area or twice as much economic performance per acre as the other model, a quarter of the arterial trips, a sixth of the arterial turning movements and less than a quarter of the vehicle miles traveled or four times the economic performance per unit of traffic than the other model. And again, this is still driving, right? There's nobody taking the bus, there's nobody biking, right? This is what happens in a main street environment where you share parking, you manage the parking well and you allow enough concentration to allow the needs of daily life to be within walking distance. This is how downtown Davis works and it's magical, right? It's one of the reasons why it is so economically successful and Joe Minna-Katzee will actually quantify exactly how much more productive your downtown is compared to other commercial districts within the city and also particularly compared to places like Macaville. So San Francisco has been working on these ideas for a long time and obviously much more urban than Davis but the principles apply directly at every scale. So the SF Park program, San Francisco got $15 million from the Bush administration to think about parking differently. So they did some pilot and pilot test areas and control areas invested in smart meters that take credit cards, invested in sensors on the parking spaces that collected immense amount of data about availability throughout the time of day. And San Francisco took a stab at getting the price right and for them that meant again, establishing the lowest price that ensured about 15% of parking spaces on every block face and every parking lot and in every garage, about 15% were available at all times of day or night and that meant needing to vary the price not only geographically but in time brackets throughout the day. It's cause some of these districts were peaking at night like in the Castro which is an evening entertainment district. Others were peaking during the day like downtown and then using the data from their sensors which they pushed out to the public and to very angry skeptical merchants and neighborhood association people. They tracked this very publicly and they altered the price. They allowed the price to go up or down by about a quarter every couple of months and they kept making these small adjustments until supply and demand came into balance and guess what? Parking is just like any other commodity in our society. We can use price to balance supply and demand. In transportation uniquely, we use time to balance supply and demand. So this is the Soviet communist method of commodity management rather than using price. We have socialized driving and parking in America. We have underpriced it and therefore we put up with the equivalent of the Soviet bread line. It's instead of using price to balance supply and demand, we use time here in America. So San Francisco capitalist conspiracy that it is decided to try using price to balance supply and demand and see what happens. So they'd collect a lot of data, made adjustments and over time basically they were able to hit their target in every time band on every block. And this resulted in all kinds of interesting different outcomes. So one of the surprises was that they had to reduce the price of parking on more blocks than they had to raise the price of parking. But on the main primo blocks where all the demand was, there was a significant raising of the price of parking that resulted in a net increase in revenue. That increase in revenue however was offset by a significant loss of revenue on the enforcement side. And this is great. San Francisco is no longer criminalizing its best customers by making it easy to find a parking space and easy to pay. And if your shopping trip is going better than you expected, easy to top off the meter. Incredible results that also created benefits for retail sales, for transit travel time and also for safety because we theorize that it reduced the kind of road rage that was being experienced in places where it was impossible to find a space. So they did tremendous amount of research and analysis. All of that is available at sfpark.org if you want, if you're super, super wonky about parking. And just this week because of the success of this program, these, all of this management was expanded citywide. Finally, I wanna conclude quickly with some thoughts about planning for the future. So this is a really interesting time to be in the transportation space. We've been talking about technologies like autonomous vehicles since 1939, right? It was in the General Ford Futurama exhibit at the 39 World's Fair in New York. All of the design of autonomous highways was complete by the 50s, but it seems like it's actually happening this time. And it's gonna create some rather profound changes in our world. There's a whole other lecture about some of the more catastrophic changes that are in, you know, certainly gonna happen on our current trajectory. But one of the interesting upsides to autonomous vehicles is the impact on parking. All of this is supported by some of the generational change that I talked about earlier, about attitudes, about transportation. So only today, only about 60% of 18-year-olds in the United States have a driver's license compared to 80% in my generation. And auto loans are dropping precipitously among young people, in part because people of my generation and older have taxed young people in order to hold on to our own entitlements. But that's a whole other story. Thank you, young people, for my lifestyle. I really like it. But also, addintutional changes about, for example, use of car share, zip car, and other services, use of Uber and Lyft, and other transportation network companies, all of those services are up dramatically, particularly among younger adults. And the results that we're getting, for some reason the font is not there, the results that we're getting is pretty profound in terms of that automobile dependency is no longer built into the system for younger adults. Part of it is because we've made them poor, but also part of it is about attitudes around mobility. This is really, really good news for us older people who still want to drive because the last thing that we want is other people driving in front of us, which our current policies encourage. So for those of you who are motorists and like the idea of easy motoring utopia, you really want your zoning code to reward these younger people and to have them not have cars. That's the only way we're gonna be able to continue to drive. This is good news regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum or where you sit on the mobility spectrum. There's some bad news as well, including the fact that in cities like San Francisco and New York, the rise of Uber and Lyft is eating away at bus transit. So poorly performing transit is dropping significantly in ridership. Good performing transit, transit that is protected from congestion, whether that be rail or bus rapid transit or any kind of express bus services, all of those are experiencing record breaking ridership. There is a great flight to quality that is starting to happen that is going to require a pretty significant response by public transit agencies in order to catch up. And this is happening fast. So while autonomous vehicles would be a while before they're out there on the street, it's important to record to remember the history of the transportation industry. So while the automobile didn't become dominant in the United States until the post-war era, really in the 1950s, the entire regulatory structure for allowing automobile dominance in cities, that regulatory structure was complete in the late 1920s through the late 1930s. All of the structures that still drive automobile orientation today were done then. And the Ubers and the General Motors are added again at the state legislatures and at the federal level to ensure that autonomous vehicles will dominate cities in the same way that the automobile did. So AAA invented the term j-walking and partnered with General Motors in order to criminalize walking for the first time in the early 1930s. The autonomous vehicle manufacturers recognize that if your autonomous vehicle automatically stops for a kid bouncing a ball into the street, it'll take pedestrians all of three minutes to realize when they're standing there in the rain at the corner, waiting for the light to change, that if they just walk into the intersection, all the cars will stop. So I get to go to the automobile technology conferences that are all about, okay, how do we deepen criminalization of pedestrian miscreant behavior by using facial recognition to automatically cite pedestrians who break the rules? So that's a whole other lecture. Let's talk more about parking. So all is to say, this is happening fast and it's happening faster than the useful life of any parking garage. Cities that are going into debt to build parking today, it's unbelievable to me that anyone would actually lend money for a parking structure when we know that in a place like San Francisco, we're expecting about an 80% drop in parking demand with autonomous vehicles in part because of mode shift, but also because the vehicles can just go park themselves. Parking no longer needs to be in any way connected to an individual land use. You can send the car away to park or more likely automobile ownership declines dramatically even as automobile use increases. Why would I buy just one car to suit my every need when I can call up whatever kind of car that I need for the trip? You know, why would I default to a Honda Civic when sometimes I need a pickup truck and sometimes I need like hot date night out car, right? Why not just get the car that I need for the job? So this drop of parking demand that is occurring at the same time we're seeing attitudinal shifts is really interesting for cities who are thinking about their future. The mayor of Redwood City once in a presentation that I was at paused in the middle of my presentation and said, okay, so what you're saying is we should manage the city for the population of today but we need to plan for the population of the future. I and my wants and needs are totally irrelevant in a zoning code, right? The zoning code is about the next 50 years. It's not about me. It's about my grand children, right? So think about as you're thinking about your zoning code what your grandkids would want and what kind of a city you'd want them to have access to. On our current trajectory, they're not going to enjoy the same privileges that all of us have. So how do we help them and how do we give them what they need rather than what we want? So other things to think about are if you are building parking, is it convertible? Can you do something else with it? Does it have level floors? Is it resilient to the coming changes? Can you, like in this parking structure in Miami, turn it into an event venue as demand declines or as it simply shifts around by time of day or when you have special events? Can you design in resiliency and adaptability into your future parking supply in order to accommodate a very different and still rather unknown future even though we know it's going to radically change? So just a few words of conclusion. Your zoning code, along with your budget, are the most profound statement of your municipal values. As you're embarking upon this exercise, you need to be really clear about what your municipal values are and how you would know whether your values are being met. In fact, I would argue you need to quantify what it is that you're looking for and to ensure that every aspect of governance, particularly the code and particularly the budget, that those regulations, those regulatory, those framing documents point you towards the array of outcomes that best meet your community values. With that, I think I'm over time. So I think we're gonna have some little panel discussion, right? With you, too. Okay. We're really up there. All right, so everyone up and we'll have a little panel discussion and then I think there's some structured questions, right? Thank you. Where do I go? So thank you very much for that very informative and thought provoking presentation. We're going to take a little bit of time to get some reaction from our panelists and then we'll go to questions and answers or questions from the audience. So we have Denise Peach with us and Denise is a Davis resident and on the board of directors of the Village Home Owners Association and she retired this year from her role at the California State Department of Aging where she was chief of community-based adult services. She is an expert in understanding and addressing the needs of seniors. We also have Laura Podolski. She's a former UCD student and resident now living in Midtown Sacramento. She commutes by train and bike to Davis to her job as policy director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at UC Davis. She's a millennial and can report on what her generation is looking for in a place to call home. Yeah, so who knew just one person will comment on a whole generation of people. And we have Michael Bish. Most of you know has been actively involved in the Downtown Business Association and is an owner-operator of Davis commercial properties and my name is Brett Lee and I'm currently on the city council. So in terms of the format, we're going to ask for your initial reactions. Let's try to keep it to about three-ish sort of minutes and then we will, initial reactions to the presentation and then we'll open it up to the audience for questions. Why don't we go ahead, Denise? Thanks. Initial reaction. I thought of one of the more amusing lines that came out of Washington in the last year. It was about healthcare. I've spent my life in my career in healthcare and aging services and so it was healthcare. Who knew it was so complicated? And I kind of felt myself parking. Who knew? And then it could be so interesting. So I just had a few things that I furiously was taking notes on because it was fascinating to me. I had never heard so much about parking. A couple of things, the assumptions behind parking rules being for 35-year-olds. I think that you said that, the average 35-year-old. Well, clearly we have an aging population in California throughout the nation. Poll after poll says that people want to stay in place. They want to age in place in their communities. They don't want to leave their homes. So we have an aging demographic mandate in California and in Davis as well. So that came to mind. A couple of the things, the Mountain View example of letting the businesses use their curb space, I think that's a fabulous idea, increasing sociability. I was reminded of the information that we know about social engagement and that being a social determinant of health, people's health and well-being, directly tied to how much they're engaged in their communities and their social opportunities. And we know that isolation is one of the major negative factors for mental health and for aging and health in general. So independence, mobility, engagement, all equal better health and happiness in communities. And that's a pretty well-known stat. I was also struck by something actually, I had a city tree removed in front of my house recently because it was breaking my water mainline and it reminded me of this with the parking spaces and what is it that we want? Do we want more parking spaces or do we, it's pretty simple math. Do we want more housing, more parking? Do we want more trees, do we want more parking? And I personally, well, that's where I come out on that issue. I'd like to have more trees, more open space, more housing, then more parking. A couple of the things just, recently I went to a forum at the Sierra Health Foundation in Sacramento. They do wonderful speaker presentations and they hosted a number of great speakers on the topic of livable communities and responding to aging. And I did a bunch of digging through the best cities successful aging. It's put out by the Milken Institute. They were presenting at that conference. It was great, the Center for Future of Aging. I didn't see parking in there once. I'm gonna go dig back through it again. They rate cities throughout California. They rate the top 100 large metropolitan areas and smaller areas. And transportation is one of the nine criteria that they evaluate. And I double checked as we were talking. There's nothing in there about parking. So I'm fascinated by that. And then just one more thought that I just wanna, excuse me, to share. Still dragging around a cold for the last two weeks. About resources and the AARP has a fabulous website if anybody's interested in the subject of aging and communities and the livability of communities. They have great toolkits, resources for checklists. And I was curious, and maybe this is for the discussion later on, about their walking audit toolkit and wondering if we're gonna do that as a community as part of our core area evaluation. It's basically a toolkit for communities to walk the streets and rank the streets for all sorts of livability factors. And curious about how we might engage our consultant team. I know that's not part of your charge, Jeff, but in doing that, to see how all these things shake out for the livability. So great tools. Again, if anybody's interested, I'd be happy to talk to you about it afterwards. But many of the things that you were talking about, I think go dovetail back, of course, to how suitable our cities are for social engagement and for safe transit and mobility, which is so important, especially to aging and special needs communities. So those are some of my comments. Thank you. And representing the entire millennial generation, Laura will give us... I'll do it, yeah. Action. So I do find myself often when they're talking about millennials and I'm happy to share, because it is always interesting, the assumptions that they'll make about millennials. Like I was in a meeting before, and I heard when they go on vacation, they'll rent a car. And I'm like, I'm doing that this weekend because I don't have a car. So, well I do live in a household with one car and we share it and I take my bike and I take it on the train and I ride here to Sacramento. I'm totally fine with it. And I'm really glad that you ended your presentation with this future. And that's something we think a lot about at the Institute of Transportation Studies, where I work at UC Davis. There's not been a lot of interesting things happening in transportation since the introduction of automobiles. It's pretty much stayed the way it is. You put gasoline in it and it runs. And now we have electric vehicles that are one of the revolutions that we look at. Another revolution is shared mobility. Smartphone enabled, shared mobility. And then autonomous vehicles, which is the game changer. And so something else, this is exciting. And I guess I'll just, I don't think it's just because I'm a millennial, but I can't bring it on soon enough. Like I wanna call up my car when I need a truck, if I need to get something at the hardware store, or if I need a small vehicle, or if I wanna take a group of friends to Tahoe, and we all wanna ride in the same van or something. So, and a term that I hear a lot in the world I am in, and I'm probably, you do too, Jeff, is transportation as a service. And so that's a big, if you go away with one wonky term, that's one, transportation as a service. And I love the analogy of Netflix. So when Netflix happened right, that was just what? You can just order whatever movie you want, and I pay $10 a month, and I get all the streaming I want. And I look forward to transportation turning into this monthly service that we buy, or a yearly service. And so I really, that's where things are headed, like period. I really don't think we're gonna have the same models of car ownership at all. Definitely within our lifetime. And that's what's really exciting too, in our lifetime, automated vehicles will be introduced, and they're gonna revolutionize the way that we live, where we, how we live, where we live, and our quality of life. So I think in this downtown plan, it's really to think big and bold, and as Jeff's mentioning, it's looking 20, 30, 40 years out in the future, and a big part of that is the introduction of automated vehicles. So it's not so much as how we're gonna regulate parking, or parking strategies, which should be a part of it, but what are we gonna do with them when it's no longer needed? And that's a huge part, and you hit on that, Jeff. And I think that's what's really exciting. And I always tease people riding my bike in downtown Davis, that you can already understand how behaviors might shift with automated vehicles, because you will have very empowered bicyclists and pedestrians that know vehicles will stop. I can't tell you how frustrating it is trying to get through an intersection in downtown Davis, because nobody knows what they're doing. Like the cars don't know what they're doing, you have students that don't care about stop signs, and I've never felt so compelled to be that crotchety woman on the bike, like, you gotta stop. And I never feel compelled to yell, but it's just so dysfunctional. And it's because pedestrians and bicyclists know that the car will stop for them. And so that just gives you insight into how dysfunctional downtowns are gonna be when bicyclists and pedestrians know the vehicles are gonna stop for them. And so I just, it's just, I already tell people, if you wanna know what it's gonna be like, go to downtown Davis, that is like the world we are gonna live in. We are just gonna be in our automated vehicles just sitting there in traffic. And you know, and I really, I didn't hear about the facial recognition, which is quite frightening, but I could see that happening. But I really, you know, and I've heard other people say, do we totally rethink our downtowns and our automated vehicles even allowed in our downtowns? Because you're not gonna build separate pathways for bikes and peds, you're just not gonna probably do that. So I think that's interesting. The other comment I would make before I pass it along, because we were supposed to be three minutes, but some other big topics in transportation, is this move to electric vehicles? You know, there's already rumors that they wanna ban the sale of cars that use fossil fuels. And so I just think about parking and how you charge your vehicle and how those things mix and mingle. So just something else to think about. And then freight wasn't really brought up today. And it's often not brought up when we're doing downtown planning. But if you are a bicyclist, you know when you're pushed out into the traffic lane because there is a truck there unloading. And I always ask the question, like couldn't you unload somewhere else? Where is your parking space? And so it's always, I think, as a city, it's really important to also think about how do we get goods in and out of a downtown and do they have space so that you're not pushing your most vulnerable traveler such as bicyclists into a travel lane? And just as an antidote to that, we met with the city of Sacramento and to talk specifically about what their truck strategy was or freight strategy for their downtown. And before we went there, we looked in their downtown plan and I quickly searched for truck and freight and neither came up once. And that is, it's a much more dense downtown. So anyways, those are the two contributions I would make too as you start thinking about your downtown. Thank you. So Michael, any reaction to the presentation this evening? Yeah, actually I do have a few reactions. Jeff, you were saying something about what was it that we could do if we're not being paid to be up here and we're not on the courier specific plan update team. It was something about being provocative and even outrageous, right? Okay, so I'm not being paid to be up here and I'll take full license there. How many people here strenuously disagreed with the best practices that Jeff was sharing with us? Raise your hands. You strenuously disagreed? Oh, I think he said agree. How many people strenuously disagreed with what Jeff was sharing with us? So I was standing in the very back and it looked to me from your body language that you all pretty much agree with it if not already know it. And actually that's what I found so interesting is we actually know most of these things. In fact, our community formed a task force to study all these best practices and all these case studies. What was it, three years ago, four years ago, Brett? Our community studied this for close to 14 months. And almost everything that you shared with us, we knew, it's captured. But I'm gonna carve out your concluding remarks because those were very different. And yet something very, despite the fact that we know all these things and much of it is captured in our foundational documents, an odd thing happens at a specific moment every Tuesday evening, somewhere between 6.30 and 7. And that noise that causes this odd behavior is a city council meeting getting called to order. It also happens sometimes on Wednesdays when we have planning commission meetings, when those meetings are called to order because for whatever reason, when particular projects or policies are discussed at the planning commission, the city council meeting and other commissions, we decide to just junk these best practices. It happens over and over and over again. We're fully aware of what the science is, what the data is, but when these policies and projects come before the decision-making bodies, we decide to junk them. It's a very odd dynamic. And so that was my reaction listening to what Jeff was sharing with us was I know all these things. I know all of you know these things because we've talked it to death. And yet when it comes time to make decisions, we disregard it. As far as the concluding comments, that's probably one thing where people went, huh. So what I heard you say is that our fiscal planning documents and our other foundational documents like our courier-specific plan and other specific plans and general plans, that these aren't actually for today. You said what, Jeff? For the future. And I'm wondering how many people sitting here today agree with that statement. But again, when the meetings are called to order, do we believe it? When we go through this courier-specific plan update and then on into the general plan update, is that what we're gonna believe is that gonna be the prevailing thought that how we're gonna conduct ourselves in those outreach meetings and those committee meetings that we're planning for the future, for our children, for our grandchildren, or is it to address some concern that we're experiencing today? So we're gonna open it up to questions from the audience, but I can't resist taking the bait from Michael. I will be the first to admit that, although I do not own a horse and buggy, I still think that one day I might want to own one and so some of these historical planning requirements may make sense in some alternate universe. Anyway, my colleague Lucas Frerichs is in the back. I will ask people due to probably a good number of people who will want to ask questions if you can be relatively concise with your questions and try not to provide too much context or background or information about your life experience from the first time you moved to Davis. Yeah, that would be good. We're gonna go, it's 8.25, just a quick time check, 8.25, we're gonna go to 8.45, so 20 minutes of Q&A. I will rotate from one side of the room to the other, try and get as many as possible. Folks, Jeff I think for sure, but others may stay afterwards as well to answer additional questions that don't come up or that are not answered rather. And then actually one last quick thing before you go and do it now, just to make the announcement, let's see, a couple things. So a couple interesting facts, 25% of people that came this evening either biked or walked here. So yay, that's awesome. We have roughly 90 attendees on a Wednesday night, so thanks for coming out this evening, that's pretty great. And then the next Davis Future Forum event is going to be January 11th, featuring Saacog, Sacramento Area Council of Governments, CEO, new CEO, James Corliss. So here in this room, January 11th, mark your calendars, hope you're all be here. Big plug for James, he's one of the best in the industry. Okay, you didn't mention very much about transit, public transit. Yeah, we have pretty good public transit here, but it needs to be better. What can you add to that in your scenario because you've left that dynamic pretty much out? Yeah, so this was really about parking and less about mode shift, right? Yeah, it matters. And Davis is remarkably fortunate in that your transit system can actually capture some of the value that it creates. In most of the rest of the country, public transit agencies are a structurally flawed business model in that they do not control their operating environment and it's illegal for them to capture the benefits that they create. Here in Davis, because of the partnership with both the city and the university, the transit system is actually an agent for the university to be able to avoid parking construction. Something else I didn't mention was the unique nature of the university where the university is required by law to pay for its parking system through parking user fees. It's illegal for the university to subsidize parking. It's just fine for the city to subsidize parking. And that results in a really interesting dynamic, including the university realizing that it's a lot cheaper for them to subsidize transit than it is to build another parking structure. And the residents of the city being able to take advantage of that transit investment that is being driven heavily by the university itself, right? So you all win as a result of the legally required rational parking management that the state of California inflicted upon the university. So I think there's many things that the city can learn from your immediate neighbor here and apply to your own success, including allowing the transit system to step it up to the next level, which means making it fast and frequent and reliable and protecting it from recurring congestion. Something else that is happening that I didn't mention as well is last week, the state office of planning and research issued their final guidelines for eliminating use of level of service as an environmental analysis criterion statewide. Level of service says that a person on board a 40 passenger bus is valued at one 40th the value of somebody driving alone in a car. And a person on foot or on a bike, it's not that they don't matter, it's that they only matter insofar as they slow down people driving alone in a car. So that change as well creates the possibility for thinking about your street system as a means to move people, rather than a means to move cars, which your current regulatory environment prioritizes. Great, thank you very much. Next question. Okay, thanks. Yeah, I think addressing the idea of it being for the future, which I think we all agree with, sometimes people are afraid of what will happen right now, because we've left out the management part. Maybe we're stuck in just managing, but we need both. And I think that one of the things that people like me worry about is about people who aren't able to walk. People who have disabilities will not be able to walk. And I would like to know what you've seen in your experience that's innovative for addressing that. So automobile dependency is bad for everyone. It's particularly bad for people who have any kind of mobility impairment, right? If it's particularly for folks who can walk some, but for whom walking is limited, right? Folks like that can maintain full, complete, rich, sociable lives when the needs of daily life are closer together. But it also means not going from one extreme to the opposite extreme, which is one of the logic traps that many Americans fall into, that this sort of thinking that, okay, like if we're like the end of gross automobile dependency means that like my car is like going to be pulled, like my steering wheel is gonna be pulled out of my cold hands, and that like cars are gonna be banned. One of the things that I actually really love about the last 50 years of planning history in Davis is you've worked really hard and actually done better than almost anyone else at having it both ways of minimizing automobile dependency while still accommodating drivability. That the tensions between those two are fraying, right? There is a real tension there and I think you're gonna need to renegotiate where you draw the line between, but it doesn't mean going from one extreme to the other and it means also thinking about people's whole lifespan and the fact that your need for driving may vary a lot depending upon where you're at in your life. If you have small children versus older children versus no children in the house, whether you're very able-bodied or I'm starting to have creeping mobility impairments, right? Needs vary, so accommodating that, but doing it in a way that doesn't force everyone to drive, and the other thing that we know from aging science is the minute our bodies are dependent upon daily walking in order to function optimally. Older adults who live in an environment where it's possible for them to continue walking safely, slowly, with a little walker putting around like taking forever to get across the street, people who get to live in those environments live a lot longer and are a lot healthier and more independent than older adults that are stuck in a car and for whom walking is stripped out of their lives, right? So I think it's particularly important, particularly for that range of people from being fully able-bodied to being restricted to a wheelchair or other mobility device. As our bodies age, the more we can keep walking a little bit every day, the better it is for us and for society. You mentioned our immediate neighbor to the east, to the west. Not only are they our largest single contributor to parking demand, but we are also their host community. There's a symbiotic relationship that isn't being engaged in the way that we're planning parking. If you were the Wizard of Oz, would you wave your wand and make UC Davis and the city manage and plan their parking together? Well, I don't, I think, I mean, there's always the struggle with town-gown relationships. This town and gown are very closely knitted together, more so than a lot of other campuses. But again, your management and regulation and funding need to be a statement of values. And there are ways in which your values are very divergent. In the city, economic development is an important value. You're really, you're heavily property and sales tax dependent. You need to be managing your capital assets in order to support your tax base in order to be able to continue to provide a very high level of services for your residents. You see... It's crazy talk coming out of your mouth right now. And Davis provides a very high level of services for its residents. It's part of the pleasure of living here, right? And that money needs to come from somewhere, right? Again, like how you spend your money is a statement of values. UC has a different set of values. In many ways, those values are very compatible, but they're different. And so it's okay to have different management approaches that speak to the particular needs of your community. Similarly, how you manage parking in the downtown is gonna be very different than how you manage parking elsewhere in the city, including the commercial areas elsewhere in the city. It's fine, just be thoughtful about it and understand what are the outcomes that you're looking for and how would you measure whether you'd achieve those outcomes? So I'm glad you finally brought up the aspect of children. It seems a lot of the discussion about parking and so forth really assumes a single person in a car and commuting and so on and so forth. So I think that there's a, I appreciate some thoughts from a millennial perspective about at some point you're gonna have children. How would that change your lifestyle? Do you see that changing your lifestyle and how might they change a parking conundrum? The second aspect of it, I just wanna make an observation here in town when I compare the downtown area and when we voted on the target complex there, I mean, there's more retail space there in target and there's a lot more parking. And if I had a family and I'm trying to clothe them or buy things for them, I would go to Target rather than downtown. How do you reconcile that? And I'll add to that question. Parking is highly gendered. And would love your thoughts about the role that gender plays and how we use and manage and think about parking. These work. So unfortunately, I'm the youngest of three kids and my sister and brother already have kids. So I'm a millennial and I'm totally not having kids. So I don't think my housing will change. So, and that's one of the statistics you see about millennials is that they're waiting longer to get married. I checked that box. I just got married this summer and that we're not having kids. And I checked that box too. And again, fortunately, my mom already has some grandkids. So she's letting me have a pass. So that's how I would answer the first one. But I think that's a really good question and that's a question a lot of people have is how will millennials' preferences change over time? And I think if you're a millennial that has kids or if you're anyone in different parts of your lifestyle, your preferences change. So I think we've all lived in weird apartments above somewhere for $100 a month at some point because we had to. And so I think making those options available is a good thing. It helps everyone in different points of their life. We're also doing a study at UC Davis just to look at that specific question. So it's a longitudinal study of millennials' lifestyle preferences, their housing preferences, their use of technologies, their environmental leanings and trying to gather all this information so that we can see how these things change as they progress in different stages of their life. Because I think a lot of people are asking that question, not you and many others in transportation planning. And so the other question, was the second question for me too, I couldn't remember that one, or just whoever. And then I remember your question about gender bias. I've never thought of that before, but there must be a bias in everything, right? You're always as. So I'm curious how you thought about it. So I have weird friends who talk about gender issues and mobility. And in the mobility space, it might as well be 1954 in terms of how gender and travel behavior go together. Women are still overwhelmingly burdened by all of the transportation needs that result from children, right? Children, particularly these days, kids are over-scheduled. And that requires full-time chauffeur. And just the complexity of the mothers that I know, the lives of what they have to contend with, shuttling kids around and working out carpools. And also still having, most of them, a conventional nine-to-five job outside the home, that places an immense burden on women. There's also, of course, women perceive personal security very differently than men. And parking and personal security go hand-in-hand, right? So the creepy underground parking garage, right, that got the parking lot out of the way, allowed for greater economic development, but is now terrifying the woman walking alone in the dim underground space or walking three blocks to her car on street where she can save a couple dollars on parking, or if you're a business owner and carrying your cash register receipts to the bank, right? I mean, there's this whole array of issues where gender plays a big role in mobility in general, but very particularly in parking. And it's rarely talked about, it's very emotional, and it contributes to a lot of the irrational discourse on this topic of parking. And in part, that is due to transportation in general being very male-dominated, but the parking industry in particular is overwhelmingly run by men. Right, we have just a quick time check, about seven minutes left, and we have at least seven people that have their hands up, so that's probably not gonna work. I'll check in at 8.45 again. Maybe the speakers or the panelists are willing to go to nine, but we'll do a time check at 8.45. Okay, thank you. I've had a number of conversations with professional friends who tell me the same story about autonomous vehicles being the game changer, and frankly, there's some of that logic that is lost on me. I really don't get it. I think the game changers are the trends in millennials and younger people not owning cars. I think car ownership changing is really the game changer. Mobility services, Uber-like services, like Ride Austin has done, making them municipal services. The ability of people to call up on your cell phone, get a ride, go downtown by groceries, and so on. But if you have those services, I see very little difference between whether a robot is driving or a human is driving, and especially if it's aging people who may need assistance getting in and out of their house and carrying their groceries, having a human driver is better. The number one employer of men in the US, I understand, is driving something. So why do we want to put them out of work? It seems to me that there's a lot of hype around autonomous vehicles, and it's basically people who love technology and see a lot of money-making opportunities, but I don't see the real value of it. Is there a question in there? The question is what you're doing. I'll answer for myself. I remember the Western movies where the person would go into the saloon and they would send their horse away, and then when they came out, they would whistle and the horse would show up. And personally, I enjoy driving. I think if my car had the ability to drive itself, I would probably get dropped off downtown and send it home, and it would sit in my driveway. And then when I came out from coffee or restaurant or movies, I would either on my smartphone or somehow it would know to come pick me up. And so the need for downtown parking would be eliminated. So the autonomous component would definitely change sort of the parking requirements that I would bring to wherever I was going, but I'm happy to hear from that. And I'd jump in just quick on the aging issue. I'd say that for adult day services that I've worked in my whole career, we've had transportation requirements that are door to door, meaning that we don't have driving services where they're dropping off the individual who has mild cognitive impairment, dementia at the curb and hoping for the best. They actually escort them to the door and get them to a caregiver. So that's a huge issue with aging populations. Now that said, like for aging populations and special needs populations, eliminating the driver and converting the driver into somebody who's actually a service agent can actually provide a far better quality of service, right, yeah, and have a different kind of employment but a net stabilization of employment. So there's a very, very long lecture about the likely implications of autonomous vehicles and we don't have time to get into the whole thing. A couple of points though that I would add. For many of the technologists, the current trajectory basically just looks like a cheaper version of Uber and Lyft. And I would agree that that in and of itself is not game changing. What the savvier folks in the industry are realizing is that the nature of the commodity changes radically. In urban places with autonomous vehicles, it is unlikely for, you know, that most people will own cars in the future. People will use services to get the car that they need. And that means that auto manufacturers will no longer be selling direct to consumers but rather to fleet services providers. What is the game changer? Is that the nature of the commodity changes from being a vehicle to being a service? And the thing that will make you money is not selling a car but capturing the value of the time of people inside the vehicle. Who's the biggest investor in autonomous vehicle technology? Google, what's Google's revenue model? 95% of their revenue is advertising. Why is an advertising company investing in car technology? Yeah, just connect those dots for a second and realize that it's just like with the internet, you know, the beginning in the 80s, everyone thought the internet was gonna be this big deal, right? The only people who made money off of the internet were people who invested in advertising, bundled services like Amazon and sex. The same will be true for autonomous vehicles, right? No, I'm quite serious about this. It's, so you no longer need to stare at the road in front of you. You're trapped in a vehicle. It knows who you are, where you're coming from, where you're going. It has your credit card and it's linked to all your social media. And you have 20 minutes to kill. What are you gonna do with your time? That is where things change and also where things get really scary, like saying, oh yeah, I'm happy to share a ride but only with passengers of 4.5 stars or better or only with passengers of my same demographics. So I never have to interact with somebody who looks differently than I do or who has a different belief system. Autonomous vehicles have the likelihood of threatening the very foundations of democracy by allowing ourselves to isolate ourselves physically in the same way that we've done on Facebook. That's another lecture. Thank you. I know it's like groaning in hand. Oh, no, yeah. That was not the response that I, it was really weird. So 8.45, are you willing to go for 15 more minutes? Yes? Nine o'clock and then people can leave as they need, of course. So there's a bunch of questions still, so go right ahead. Okay, thank you. I wanna touch base on, I thought Michael's comment at the beginning sort of hit the nail on the head is the disconnect between what we know and how we act. And so I was wondering as we go into a planning process for Davis's future, how do we continue to empower local leaders to arrive at these rational decisions and then community members to process feelings and arrive at the same place? How do we operationalize that? So it's really punishing being an elected official. It's also really punishing being a department head. Parking is a super irrational topic and it's oftentimes a flashpoint. It's a proxy for completely unrelated issues that have to do a lot with demographic and economic change. I mean, I was, literally I was working in Moscow and when the Soviet Union dissolved, they forgot to delegate to municipalities the authority to manage the curb. And so if Moscow wanted to change a curb designation, they had to get federal legislation to do that. So they finally took care of getting the authority to manage parking and I would go to these workshops in Moscow neighborhoods and people would be in tears around changes to parking management because it was literally the very last aspect of Soviet communism, something that a lot of Russians have a great deal of nostalgia for, particularly in the worst days of the capitalist oligarch mess that they created when they changed their social systems. So that's a long preamble to say. If you believe in these things, you need to show up. You need to show up at council hearings and argue passionately, right? Because it's usually only, it's never the satisfied who come and show up at council, right? The work is done like, okay, that's over I don't have to attend these community meetings anymore. No, you've got to carry it all the way through in order to show support for elected officials who are taking a big risk in taking on controversial topics. So showing up is a big deal. There's also an immense amount of staff work that needs to be done and that is also really hard. The way we, so I was interim director of the Oakland Department of Transportation last year, which opened my eyes up in many ways to realize how we punish the best department heads for taking risks. It's any failure in municipal government is unacceptable, right? The press is so cruel to city staffers who make any kind of mistake. The force of change that is impacting American communities is so great that in order to just hold steady you've got to work so hard and take so many risks and make so many changes that some kind of failure is inevitable. So teaching staff people to fail skillfully and insisting upon the right rate of failure is essential. If you expect perfection from city staffers, you can pretty much be guaranteed that there'll be a gross misalignment between values and policy because some level of failure is necessary. So get comfortable with that and reward the best staffers. Like how many of you have ever given a staff person a little paper certificate or called them up or thanked them publicly or thanked them in the press for having done a good job or having gone above and beyond the call of duty? Every single staff person in the city, like they are not paid well, they're there because they're dedicated to the idea of public service and they are never thanked. They're certainly never thanked for taking risks and really doing the right thing. So that's my advice to all of you is this is a democracy and you as the people are responsible for making this work and for helping the people who are doing both the hard staff work and the hard policy adoption. Reward them. So I'd add something specifically to the day of the situation. Michael's right, about four years ago realizing there was a parking issue. We constituted a parking task force with, call it about a dozen folks. It meant for about a year, once a month they would meet and had a fairly substantial packet of reading, would have experts from the university come and speak and at the end of it, the group was near unanimous on I wanna say something like 16 or 17 recommendations and there was a great amount of overlap in terms of the slides that you showed. I would say 80% overlap. Key was paid parking and so related to, so the good news is we've gotten there. About three months ago the council voted to implement a paid parking program in the downtown in a fairly sizable area of the downtown and about nine months earlier, we nine months and 10 months earlier, we allocated in the order of I'm gonna say something like three or $400,000 to sort of parking technology in terms of information, in terms of utilization of our parking garages and better signage so people would know where the parking availability is. At that time paid parking was discussed and there was sort of a pilot program and vision but recently it was more expansive. I would say that the slowness has to do with the very legitimate fears of some of our constituents especially downtown shop owners who are struggling with the Amazon effect and sort of just the change in shopping trends and they are asked to embrace a counterintuitive thing which is I don't have enough customers, we're struggling and now you want our customers to have to pay to come to my shop. I don't understand, right? And so those people, they are the ones who are lobbying because they are extremely fearful of their situation. This could be the final nail in the coffin that will cause the retail business to go under. The people who sort of, well, I would go downtown but there's not much parking there. I guess I'll go to Anderson Mall or somewhere else. They're not the ones that, the public comment, they're not the ones emailing us. And so just kind of the nature of democracy, I wouldn't say it's a great system but we kind of get there and so I'm glad that we've gotten there and I'm glad that we're hiring experts to even go to the next level but I think that's part of the reason for the slowness, right? It's just this, it's kind of like the Fifth Street road redesign, many of you are familiar with that. When I ran for city council, I thought the big thing was gonna be the water project. It was the Fifth Street road diet, how it was gonna destroy our community by creating this horrible backlog of cars. And the information showed that it would actually be pretty neutral for cars and such a vast improvement for cyclists but it's a little bit counterintuitive that you go from four lanes to two and a half lanes and this would be better, right? And it's a little bit like that. My business is struggling, now you want to charge my customers to actually come and shop at my store. So that's just a little bit of context but yeah, it took way too long. I mean, just the science is there, I mean, that's what the parking task force discovered. It's pretty rock solid and so I'm very confident that when we implement paid parking, it'll be a superior system. So I'd like to thank you very much Jeff and the committee and you woke up my lizard brain for a moment and what I'd like to ask you to chime in on is we and Davis are about to make some important decisions to try to help accommodate both the growth of students and families in housing. And what we're finding is an increased demand and group of developers who want to focus on larger and larger number of bedrooms in smaller and smaller places. And my question for you is what, without getting into the specifics of a particular project or the street it's on or the EIR of that particular project, from a big picture point of view, what would you recommend to in create the best parking to beds unit ratio and what incentives should be incorporated to reduce the reliance on cars and the impact of greenhouse gases in those apartment buildings as they get built? Yeah, that's a good question. So a lot of what I included in the presentation. So you really provided you protect nearby lower density neighborhoods from spillover parking. You don't need to force developers to overpark buildings. Like the cost of that is worse than the benefits. If you're gonna get, so again, what we find is that parking is a proxy for completely unrelated issues. So people put forward parking fear as their issue but that's not really their issue. So even if you completely address all of their parking fears, you're still not gonna get them to yes because they're actually afraid of change. They're afraid that, I mean, in many respects, what I find in many neighborhoods that I work in is it's actually rooted in our fear of getting older, right? If only we can stop the community from changing, then we will stop changing, right? And the community, like no matter where you are, we always want the community to look like whatever it was when we first arrived, that was when it was perfect. So that, I mean, and that drives the politics of practically every nice California city regardless of the scale, whether it's an urban San Francisco neighborhood or a lovely edge of Davis neighborhood, we want the place to be whatever it was when we first arrived. And it was great, right? The drugs were better. We could stay up later. Life was good then, man. And you're just wanting to mess things up. So having some compassion for that, particularly here in California and the boom bust economies that we live in and the fact that what we love is so vulnerable. So what we've tended to do is to help communities articulate what exactly it is that they love about their community because it's not parking. So focus on the positive thing and ensure that your regulatory codes support the things that people most love. Oftentimes that's, you know, it's issues of community character, whether it be architectural design or your tree canopy or the fact that, you know, people drive slowly on the street, right? We can design for all of those things. We can't design for walkability and easy driving utopia at the same time. So we've got to make some trade-offs there. The other thing that we can do is we can look at transportation as a whole rather than just planning for the carbs. So why not? It's so much cheaper to provide free transit passes in perpetuity for every resident than it is to provide them with parking. It's so much cheaper to provide a shared car service in the building than it is to provide parking. Why not bundle accessibility into the building rather than bundling parking into the building? Why not provide a place for all of your Amazon delivery stuff to happen? Why not provide cold storage for your, you know, milk delivery so that folks don't need to have to get in a car to meet the needs of their daily life and that they have access to a car when they need one? And why not actually fold that into the marketing of the development program itself? Like, look, you can live here within walking distance of your school and within walking distance of downtown and there's a great spot to put your bike and we have all of these other services built in so that we can save you $7,000 on having to own a car and instead you can afford nicer amenities in your apartment than you ever thought possible. Right, that's the sort of approach and thinking that's necessary and particularly when you are marketing towards a younger demographic that is susceptible to all of these things, like, it's great. Including doing things like getting rid of the garage and putting the cafe in the ground floor not as a means of making money off of your commercial rents but as a strategy for marketing the residential units upstairs, having people feel comfortable having a much smaller unit and building social ability into the project as well. And having the cafe owner be the person who also receives your Amazon deliveries. Excellent, thank you for that one, no, no, one last final question, it's nine o'clock right now, one last question and then we'll be done for the evening. Sorry, we had to have a token millennial question in the audience too. So in downtown Davis in particular we've talked a lot tonight about management strategies specifically for vehicle parking but in Davis something that is a challenge downtown is bicycle parking as well. So I'm wondering if you have thoughts on how kind of the management strategies we've talked about the pricing and those things can transfer to parking for other modes. Sure, well, so you can fit 14 bike parking spaces in every car parking space or actually up to 25 depending upon how you configure them. So using the car parking lane to get the bikes off the sidewalks and off the trees and organize them well, really, really easy to do. And I'm assuming you've already done that here, right? Have you done no bike parking? Okay, so again, also thinking about like looking at mobility holistically, right? The amount of money that you spent building giant parking garages that you give away for free it's a lot cheaper to provide secure covered bike parking than it is to provide car parking. So I think a great peer city for Davis is Boulder, Colorado. Where after like years of arguing about parking with their merchants where the merchants were demanding the city fund more and more parking structures raising taxes to do so the city's finally said fine, like, okay, downtown Boulder you can have all of the parking lots and garages go for it, like we're not gonna control this anymore build whatever you want. And the burden said, oh, great. Like now we can finally build another parking structure and then they looked and like, oh, wow that's kind of expensive. And they kind of scratched their heads and thought, well, if it's gonna cost that much like is there something else that we can do with this money instead? And so the merchants realized, well, you know it's actually a lot cheaper for us to give every employee in the downtown a free regional transit pass than it is to build parking structure number four. It's cheaper for us to invest in providing outstanding both secure bike parking for all employees and really convenient bike parking for all shoppers and visitors make it really luxurious. So it's actually it's cheaper for us to give bikes away and do downtown promotional programs like parking is an outrageous waste of money. And so, you know, simply looking at your downtown as a whole and trying to figure out you've got limited resources how do you get the highest return on investment of those resources and at the same time achieve whatever the outcomes are that reflect your community values. That's it. Crazy, huh? Right, good. All right. So I'd like to thank the panelists and also thank the speaker and I am imagining that we'll be hanging around for a little bit. And once again, I'd like to thank the hosts and also the city for providing us this space this evening and thank you to Lucas for assisting with the questions. And don't forget to mark your calendars for January 11th next Davis Futures Forum.