Parking

As expected, a suite of far-ranging parking reforms was heard by the Los Angeles City Council's Transportation Committee yesterday. The committee was broadly receptive to the reforms, directing the city's Transportation Department (LADOT) and other departments to further investigate a number of key reforms. What was perhaps most revealing was individual city councilmember attention to specific parking issues.

Tomorrow's 1 p.m. Los Angeles City Council Transportation Committee meeting will be the first public airing of the final report of Mayor Garcetti's Los Angeles Parking Reform Working Group. In February, the Working Group delivered "Proposals for Parking Reform in the City of Los Angeles": a 40-page report [PDF] outlining an extensive series of parking policies tailored to solve parking problems within the city of Los Angeles. The recommendations are far-ranging, including parking revenue, parking minimums, freight parking, parking ticket fines, street sweeping restrictions, and much more.

The Metro Board of Directors held its monthly committee meetings this week, in advance of next Thursday's board meeting. Below are a handful of news bits gleaned from this week's committee meetings. Final decisions still need to be approved by the full board next week.

International Park(ing) Day is not the massively humongous event it has been in past years in L.A. Nonetheless, there are still parks popping up in mid- and downtown. Below is a list of some Southern California park(s) to check out. (updated with additional sites! Some additional locations at parkingday.org)

In a recent post at The Source, Metro announced a new call for joint development at four large parcels of land at and adjacent to its North Hollywood Red and Orange Line Stations. Curbed L.A. reports that the NoHo parcels could include an estimated 750 to 1,500 units of housing, up to 12 stories tall. Hopefully, plenty of that housing will be affordable, based on Metro's recently adopted joint development policies.

Yesterday's Los Angeles City Council Transportation Committee touched on a number of items related to Los Angeles livability. Below is a brief recap of highlights. All these committee actions still need to be approved by the full city council before going into effect.

At this Thursday's meeting, Metro's Board of Directors will be voting on modest changes to the way the agency manages parking. Theoretically, these changes are expected to set the stage for increased parking revenue, which has positives for walkability and livability, but the devil may be in the details.

Earlier this week, I accepted an invitation to do a downtown Los Angeles bike-along with City of L.A. Transportation Department (LADOT) parking enforcement officers. LADOT also uses bicycle officers to do parking enforcement in the Valley, West L.A., and Hollywood. The parking enforcement staff downtown is 30 strong, all on bicycle.

Donald Shoup, parking's one and only rock star, is retiring from UCLA this year. Tomorrow, the college is sending him off with a fundraiser retirement dinner atop parking structure number 32. You can attend, and hobnob with Shoup himself, by donating to the Shoup Fellowship fund for future UCLA planning students.