Commercial intrusion is addressed on page 43 where it is recommended that existing housing stock be protected from demolition or conversion to business use.

We think meters give the impression of the neighborhood being on the verge of conversion to business use, or make it seem like a satellite lot for downtown. Again, we are OK with on-street parking where it is safe and appropriate, just not meters.

In Ray Detter’s remarks to the DDA, he also referenced the Central Area plan in speaking against the inclusion of metered parking — and seemed to indicate that there might be specific language in the CAP suggesting permit parking (as opposed to meters) for residential. I can’t tell from my notes if he was citing CAP on that particular point.

I haven’t had a chance to look through CAP to confirm. As your time, ahem, permits, could you have a look? [Or anyone else, for that matter.]

For this DDA meeting report I shed the various reports from the subcommittees as a trade-off for including a bit more context for Trek’s [whose last name spelling has been corrected] public commentary. Not as a matter of length, but as a matter of the time investment required, if an entire meeting is to continue as our unit of analysis. That’s a whole ‘nother discussion.

In any event, what’s not included in the report is the discussion by the board to the effect that the weekdays M-Th, were good candidates for elimination of the valet service, given that the heaviest usage (relative here, because none of the numbers seem to warrant the description “heavy”) on Friday.

In evaluating the financial picture for the valet service, it’s worth including the context of the rationale for providing it at all. The premise is (and I think there’s studies that demonstrate this) that you cram a greater number of cars into a structure (i.e., you can get heavier usage out of a structure) if valet is an option. That’s at least plausible if you think about a scenario where a motorist sees the spaces available sign reading “5 spaces available” and says, Oh gawd, I don’t want to hunt for a space in there, let me keep driving. If valet service is an option, maybe that motorist says, Fine, I’ll valet park it.

So the DDA sees this as a mechanism for getting more effective use of the parking resource. The argument goes something like this: Even if it costs us $100,000 a year to operate it, we’re getting the equivalent of N extra parking spaces out of it — spaces that we would otherwise need to spend $M dollars per space to build, if we built a parking structure.

So how N gets calculated is an interesting question — it should probably be decided in advance of the pilot program’s evaluation. If the same numbers persisted through the entire year of the pilot, my gut feeling would be to say, Holy Cow, 20 valet parks every Friday, that’s a little bit pitiful, let’s scrap it. But who knows, maybe there’s a case to be made that those 20 parks translate into a benefit that’s worth what we’re paying.

Even if some story can be told about how those 20 valet parks really translate into saving construction cost of N parking spaces, I wouldn’t want to be the guy whose job it is to perform that tap dance every time a citizen says, What? 20 valet parks?? Are you kidding me??!

So maybe a little marketing effort here could help. I’m not sure what marketing and promotion has been done, but off the top of my head, I’d say a little miniature flier about it, handed by parking attendants at every structure to exiting cars is one way to get the word out about valet parking to people who already park in the system.

Perhaps this could be a miniature RFP issued by the DDA: A marketing plan to increase awareness of the availability of valet parking at the Maynard Street structure.

I wish I had gone to an AATA board meeting instead and worked on a bus project rather than a parking project – I could have used that a lot more for myself and not even needed to share it with anyone for it to be useful (a la the “minimuni” application that some guy in San Francisco wrote which only really works near his house).

Now, as to valet parking, I will note that with the best numbers I was able to get from the last DDA board packet, that it’s costing the DDA on average about $50 to park each car that uses the valet service in the last full month where there’s data (March), and they are getting $5 in revenue for each one. I’d respectfully suggest that there might have been a better way to do it, and that maybe, just maybe, there might be room to look at those numbers closely to see what could be done better in light of all of the possible alternatives for a program on track to have nearly $100,000 in expenses for the DDA over the course of the calendar year at its current burn rate.