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By Erika Fricke 

Daily Planet Staff 

The twin issues of parking and transit appear regularly before the City Council.  

Currently the city manager is meeting with groups to find parking spaces for the school district, the court and Vista College, said Mayor Shirley Dean. 

While the city struggles to find downtown parking spaces, some experts believe that providing parking is counter to the goal of decreasing single-occupancy automobile use. 

Elizabeth Deakin, UC Berkeley associate professor and director of the UC Transportation Center, researches ways to decrease the societal cost of the automobile. Deakin estimated the cost of a parking space within a garage at $15,000 to $20,000 while a surface space in an urban environment can cost $8,000 to $10,000 for the cost of the land.  

“We create a system where it’s really easy for people to drive their cars once they’ve bought them,” she said. “We don’t charge them for parking, we don’t charge them for air pollution, we don’t charge them for environmental damage. Society picks up a big chunk of  

the cost.”  

Deakin said that charging people for the actual cost of driving would make a significant impact in the number of cars on the road. 

City Councilmember Miriam Hawley used to be a member of the AC Transit Board of Directors. She said that Berkeley has recently used the approach of charging people more equitably for the spaces they occupy, by increasing the cost of full day parking in garages downtown.  

But, Hawley also said that Berkeley hasn’t been doing enough to put public and alternative modes of transportation at the top of the agenda. “We do offer free parking for many city employees,” she said. “We need to look at that policy, and begin to think about how not only to discourage people from parking downtown, but also encouraging people to use transit.”  

Deakin said that an important part of getting people out of their cars is finding them a feasible alternative. She mentioned a Santa Clara County subsidizes a public transit program as one good way to “encourage people to use transit.” 

Santa Clara employers can purchase an “Eco Pass” for each of their employees, which they can then use as a pass to board any Santa Clara public transit. Scott Haywood, Eco Pass sales program manager, said the numbers evidence the program’s success. Over 100 employers have purchased passes for 100,000 employees. “They’ve been really willing to put their money where their mouth is,” he said. 

City governments in Santa Clara have been some of those buyers. The city of San Jose instituted the Eco Pass in 1998. Dennis Ng, traffic engineer for the city, said according to a survey done the first year after they instituted its use, that it is changing the way some city employees get to work. 

At that time, 22 percent of their employees used public transportation, and half of those used it to commute to and from work. A much smaller percentage used the pass daily. More significantly, half of the people who indicated they used public transportation said they began to do so after receiving their Eco Passes. 

The city of Sunnyvale also purchases Eco Passes for its employees. Sunnyvale is a smaller community where parking is not yet an issue, according to Mark Dettle, acting public works director for the city of Sunnyvale.  

He said that city employees’ public transportation use did increase once the city started offering the Eco Pass. Sunnyvale incorporated the Eco Pass into its development. “We work with our new businesses that come in and encourage them to provide their new employees with an Eco Pass. We’re starting to see businesses really develop around the light rail.” 

All of the employers that purchased the Eco Pass did so in addition to providing parking. 

The closest Berkeley equivalent to an Eco Pass is the UC Berkeley class pass. All students pay an added $18 dollars each semester when they pay tuition and have the option of getting the pass – a sticker affixed to their student ID. It allows them to board any AC Transit bus. Mayor Shirley Dean is looking to the class pass and the Eco Pass as potential models for the city. “This is going to be an enormous,” she said. Dean said she envisions a plan where everyone in the city, not just city or school district employees, could get access to a pass. Dean hoped that the details would be arranged in the coming months.  

In accordance with Berkeley’s Transit First policy, the city currently offers some employees an incentive for using public transportation in the form of a monthly $20 subsidy they can redeem at Berkeley Transit Ridesharing and Parking, better known as TRIP. But access to the subsidy depends on employee contracts. Those employees who don’t fall within the bargaining units that negotiated for the larger amount receive a subsidy of $6. About 200, or 20 percent of the city’s 1,000 eligible employees redeem their $20 dollar subsidy, only a handful of those receiving the $6 subsidy redeem it. 

Rochelle Wheeler, associate planner, said that because the subsidy can only be redeemed at Berkeley TRIP, the alternative transportation center in Berkeley, many people who already use public transportation may not go to the trouble to claim their subsidies. But, she said, many more people are using transportation than the 23 that cash in their $6 subsidy.  

Employees who don’t drive can also sign on to an Alameda County guarantee ride home program, free for both employer and employee. In case of an emergency illness or unscheduled overtime, an employee can take a taxi home and pay for it with a voucher. 

But Professor Deakin said that cities can provide even more compelling incentives to get people out of their cars. She said employees who don’t drive should receive the cost of their parking space back, which they could use to purchase public transit or to line their own pockets.  

“It makes the city rethink, you know we don’t really need so much parking.”