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Sacramento Transportation Management AssociationOn Street parking rates and tickets increase (July 2008)
Parking on the street, at a meter or Pay & Display station, is now $1.25 an hour.
Parking ticket fines increase:
- Expired meter $30
- No parking zone $40
- In and Alley $40
- On the Sidewalk $40
- Loading zone, red zone, yellow zone, bus zone $40
- In a neighborhood, without a Residential permit $40
City Parking Garages offer Alternative Mode Commuter Option (AMCO)
City garages offer a downtown employee parking program for alternative mode commuters who normally utilize an alternate mode of transportation (i.e. Regional Transit, carpool, bicycle, etc.) but occasionally need to drive to work (12 times per quarter or less).
AMCO (Alternative Mode Commuter Option) allows employees who normally utilize an alternative mode of transportation to park at a discounted rate up to twelve times per quarter. MCO participants can park in Memorial Garage, Old Sacramento Garage, Tower Garage, City Hall Garage, Capitol Garage, Downtown Plaza West Garage, and Downtown Plaza East Garage. The City has an excellent map of all its garages on this page: http://www.cityofsacramento.org/dwntwn/ospr/
Where to purchase the AMCO passes
Bring your valid California driver's license to the City of Sacramento Parking Facilities office at 915 I Street, Room 1214, Sacramento. A set of 12 all-day discounted passes will be issued. AMCO passes are valid for 12 months from the date of issuance. A maximum of 12 discounted passes can be purchased per customer per quarter. Each set costs $78 for all designated facilities and $96 for Capitol Garage.
For enrollment and application, see Forms (AMCO Application (Complete Sections A, B, C, & D).
City Studies Downtown Parking. In the next 10 years, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) projects 20,000 jobs will be added in the area bounded by the American and Sacramento rivers, Alhambra Boulevard and Broadway. About 5,000 new housing units will be added in the same area.
This year, the city of Sacramento began studying how all those parking spaces in the city's core are distributed, and how to meet all the parking needs, while encouraging the choice to use alternative transportation. The goal is to create a master plan to manage it all. is becoming an issue. The city is evaluating enforcement, time limits and rates for city-controlled spaces in parking garages and at on-street meters. (Click here for the link to the August 2nd report to City Council.)
Fran Halbakken, a city project manager, is in charge of the study that is looking at what parking is available, both public and private. Years of piecemeal policy adoptions and department reorganizations left the city without a comprehensive approach to parking, according to Halbakken. It has only been in the past year that the staff in charge of on-street parking and the staff in charge of off-street parking have been brought together under the Department of Transportation.
The study began with an inventory -- city employees with clipboards counted every parking space - on street or off, free or paid, public or private. They counted about 64,000 spaces in the central city and Midtown. Enforcement, time limits and rates for city-controlled spaces are all under review.
The parking survey showed that Sacramento doesn't have the overall supply problem that led to the construction of several parking garages in the recent past, but there are still a few "hot spots," some parts of midtown where clusters of businesses have grown up without providing parking for employees or customers.
Next came a series of invitation-only stakeholder meetings in February, April and June, with another set for August; participants have included the Sacramento TMA, neighborhood associations, churches, commercial parking lot operators, Regional Transit, retailers and large employers.
Comments from attendees at the first meeting covered a broad range of concerns and requests.
- Garages in Old Sacramento close during some special events, forcing monthly patrons to park elsewhere at the same time visitors are piling into the area.
- Many bars and restaurants don't provide off-street parking. "At 2 a.m. we have drunks making their way to their cars, which are usually blocking our driveway," wrote one neighborhood resident.
- Stringent zoning regulations and beautification ordinances make it hard to profitably run a parking lot, so many property owners won't make their lots available for parking.
- Liberal granting of variances over the past three decades has resulted in too few parking spaces for renters living in the central city.
Officials will host an open house in September to give the general public an opportunity to view the findings and voice their opinions. A final presentation to the City Council is targeted for October.
Potential strategies under consideration by the city of Sacramento include
- metering more on-street parking,
- leasing private or state-owned lots to make more parking available at night and on weekends,
- temporarily allowing parking on vacant land and, of course,
- building more garages.
Parking policy is a hot topic among urban planners these days. This year Donald Shoup, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles, release his book "The High Cost of Free Parking".
Shoup argues that cities shouldn't have any off-street parking requirements at all, and that curbside parking rates should be set at whatever the market will bear, with the proceeds going to improve the neighborhoods where the money is collected. He says cities should not force anyone to provide more parking than people are willing to pay for.
Halbakken is familiar with that concept. "That is the basic philosophy in the industry: When you are over 85 percent occupied, you raise the rates to give yourself more room. But that can hurt nearby businesses, and the city has to keep them in mind as well.
"There's not one solution that works everywhere," Halbakken said.
Part of the solution is for Sacramentans to face up to the reality of a central city with limited space.
Many people believe that parking is something they don't need to pay for; people for some reason think that parking is something that belongs to them," Halbakken added.
The High Cost of Free Parking.
Donald Shoup, an economics professor at UCLA, has written a book that is
undoubtedly the most comprehensive study of parking ever undertaken in this
country. Shoup tells us that the minimum required number of parking spaces
for different businesses comes from a document called “Parking Generation,”
first published decades ago by the Institute of Transportation Engineers and
updated periodically. As Shoup puts it, local zoning officials who consult
Parking Generation “act like frightened supplicants bowing before a powerful
totem. ITE’s stamp of authority relieves planners from the obligation to think
for themselves because simple answers are right there in the book.”
Unfortunately the numbers tend to be based on a percentage of maximum occupancy
— that is, the largest number of cars ever likely to use a facility at a given
moment. The manual recommends enough spaces to ensure that virtually every
driver will be able to find a space virtually all the time. And then cities
require those spaces as a matter of law.
So, if a hotel might fill 200 rooms on the busiest day of the year, but only 50
on an average day, it has to build 200 parking spaces and leave three-quarters
of them empty most nights. Restaurants aren't built as big as they must be to
accommodate everyone on Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve. Instead we accept
that once in a while, somebody will have to be turned away.
It’s only when it comes to parking lots that planners and local governments
insist on invoking a concept as foolish as maximum capacity. And that’s for a
rather simple reason: When it comes to parking, nobody worries about losing
money. Parking, after all, is free.
Or, rather, they think it’s free. Of course, it isn’t, as Shoup details in his
733-page book, “The High Cost of Free Parking” that includes quotes from Albert
Einstein, Robert Frost, Lewis Carroll and Graham Greene, and is filled with
details about the way ordinary people live.
Most of all, however, it is filled with animosity toward free parking.
Shoup hates free parking — especially the off-street parking that developers and
businesses are required to provide in order to operate. He says it degrades
urban life in ways that hardly anybody bothers to think about. “Because we never
see the money we spend on parking,” he says, “it always seems someone else is
paying for it... but by prescribing massive overdoses of parking, planners are
poisoning the city.”
For one thing, parking lots eat up a huge amount of land
that could be used for more productive purposes. Many shopping malls devote 60
percent of their surface land to parking spaces and only 40 percent to the
buildings. For the most part, that’s not because developers insisted on all that
parking. It’s because zoning law forced them to create it. Either way, the
result is oceans of asphalt and an ugly landscape as far as the eye can see.
All the land that’s paved over and reserved for cars is land that can’t be used
for housing — affordable or any other kind. Because parking requirements have
taken so much land out of development, they force up the cost of building on
whatever land remains. Rents are higher than they would otherwise be. What’s
more, the parking requirements written into zoning law make smaller, moderately
priced apartments difficult to produce anywhere.
Some cities in Southern California require residential developers to provide as
many as 3.25 spaces per apartment. That often leaves as practical only two kinds
of projects: a massive, sprawling condo complex that meets the requirement by
paving over additional acres of land, or a boutique development that makes money
by selling or renting luxury units at luxury prices. A densely built project
filled with compact two- and three-bedroom apartments just doesn’t cost out.
Meanwhile, in the central business districts of older cities, the amount of
parking keeps increasing and the number of buildings keeps declining. Buffalo
and Albuquerque devote more central-city land to parking lots than to all other
uses combined. For anyone who wants to come downtown, a member of the Buffalo
City Council lamented a couple of years ago, “there will be lots of places to
park. There just won’t be a whole lot to do here.”
Ironically, the central city districts that have thrived in recent years aren’t
the ones that have provided the most parking; they are the ones that have
provided the least. Portland, Oregon, instead of expanding its downtown parking
capacity, has spent the past 30 years restricting it. There was less parking per
capita in downtown Portland in the 1990s than there was in the 1970s. And
Portland, as any visitor notices at once, has one of the most successful
downtowns in America.
Los Angeles and San Francisco both opened new concert halls in the 1990s. Los
Angeles included a six-level garage for 2,188 cars, built at a cost of $110
million. San Francisco, on the other hand, put in no garage — for a total cost
of nothing. After each concert in L.A., the patrons head straight for their
cars, leaving the area around the building deserted. After concerts in San
Francisco, people spill out onto the local streets, spending money in local
bars, restaurants and bookstores. Some of them have to walk several blocks to
their cars parked along the curb, but every block they walk adds extra life to
the neighborhood.
Shoup has a few modest proposals for dealing with the disasters of parking
policy.
First, instead of making developers build off-street parking, allow them to pay
a fee in lieu of each space provided, and the fees go for public improvement in
the area. If you make the fee less than the cost of building the
space, most of them will accept that deal. Some 25 American cities are actually
doing this. Most of them are small towns in California, or wealthy suburbs in
the east, but there are some surprises. Orlando, Florida, allows subsidies in
lieu of parking. So does Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The developers get to
spend more money on the actual project.
Then, since the amount of parking will be
reduced, allow commuters to take the value of a free parking space in the office
lot and trade it in for cash. They can use it on public transportation, and if
they don’t spend it all, they can keep what’s left over. Different versions of
this experiment have been tried in Denver, Dallas, Salt Lake City and San Jose.
Ultimately, though, Shoup concedes, there’s a more basic answer: Local
governments have to rethink the whole idea of parking. Minneapolis and
Chicago are now exempting the first 4,000 square feet of retail space in a new
development from any parking requirements at all.
The asphalt jungle we have created will not disappear anytime soon. As Shoup
says, “automobile dependency resembles addiction to smoking, and free parking is
like free cigarettes...it will take decades for cities to recover from the
damage.”
Parking Prices increase nationwide
Sacramento's parking rates are increasing along with those of 48 U.S. cities surveyed by Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate services firm. During the last twelve months, the average rates for monthly reserved spots increased 2.7 percent. Monthly unreserved spaces increased 3.7 percent, and daily rates rose 7 percent. Colliers expects the trend to continue, as a result of a healthier business climate and rising employment nationwide, with an even greater spike in parking rates in 2006.
Sacramento's average daily rate rose 100% between 2002 and 2005 because of an increase in demand caused by more workers and residents in midtown and downtown. Also, no new parking garages have been added to downtown's supply since 1999, while new high-rise multifamily and retail developments, such as the Safeway-anchored center on R and 19th streets, have been added, and new development has replaced some paid parking lots. A number of proposed high-rises could make parking even pricier despite the fact that all have planned parking garages.
The average daily parking fee at municipal garages in Sacramento is $15.
THINGS COULD BE BETTER . . .
- $6: Dallas and Memphis, Tenn.
- $6.50: Bakersfield
- $6.80: Houston
- $7: Cincinnati, Milwaukee and Phoenix
- $8: Austin, Texas; Boise, Idaho; Denver; Detroit; Fresno; Kansas City, Mo.; Orlando, Fla.; and West Palm Beach, Fla.
THINGS COULD BE WORSE
- $41: New York midtown
- $33: New York downtown
- $32: Boston
- $30: Honolulu
- $25: Chicago
- $23: San Francisco
- $20: Philadelphia
- $18.75: San Jose
The average amount charged nationally for a daily parking space is $14.04
The city says it parking garage revenue is about $18 million a year.
Parking rates have climbed steadily in Sacramento in the past five years, doubling for daily spaces and rising nearly 25 percent on monthly unreserved spots.
ParkSmart at the airport Starting February 1st, the automated parking system will take the guesswork out of finding a space at the airport and will make shuttle transport to the terminals faster.
Entering and exiting the lots at Sacramento International Airport is rapidly becoming as easy and convenient for credit card customers as paying for gas at the pump.
ParkSmart allows customers to gain entry and pay for their parking using only their credit card. Video screens guide all customers through the process and a call button is available to get assistance.
ParkSmart installation began in the current Hourly A parking lot and is expected to be complete in all lots at Sacramento International Airport when the parking garage opens in September 2004.
Are cash customers still welcome in the lots and can credit card customers still receive a ticket? Absolutely! Any customer can get a ticket from the machine and present it to the cashier when exiting.
ParkSmart+ makes parking easier in Economy Lots. Starting February 1, a new strategy for finding parking Economy Parking Lot, ParkSmart+, will take the guesswork out of finding a space and make shuttle transport to the terminals faster than ever.
ParkSmart+ introduces a new strategy for filling the lot that directs passengers to available parking. Parking personnel direct drivers to designated areas where shuttles are dispatched to quickly pick up passengers. Wait times will be reduced to approximately 15 minutes between shuttles and you can arrive at your terminal approximately 20—25 minutes after parking the car. Upon return, passengers will still be dropped off near their vehicles. By allowing all passengers to get off of the shuttles without loading more passengers on, the process is made more fast and efficient, improving customer service in the Economy Parking Lot.
Look for parking personnel directing you to available parking to take advantage of this program.
