Could Los Angeles become the tow truck capital of the world?
The City Council is working on it. Last week the Planning and Land Use committee approved a proposal aimed at removing the requirement that new housing developments include parking spaces for the residents.
It’s already state law, Assembly Bill 2097 in 2022, that new residential and commercial developments within one-half mile of a transit stop can’t be required to include any off-street parking spaces. The motion introduced in June by Councilmembers Bob Blumenfield and Nithya Raman calls for the Department of City Planning and the Department of Building and Safety to report on the feasibility, costs and benefits of removing all requirements for new developments to have parking spaces.
Once again, politicians in California are treating residents with a disregard they would never be allowed to show a spotted owl.
It’s obvious to anyone who isn’t drawing a lavish city salary that the habitat of the Beleaguered Californian would be negatively impacted by an outbreak of apartments and businesses without parking spaces. The quest to find street parking would become the Hunger Games, spreading in ever-widening circles around the new developments until residents screamed for permit parking.
That’s when the tow-away signs would go up on street after street. Residents would have to display current and valid permit stickers on their vehicles to protect them from being towed every night. The hook would hover, double-parked, ready to ruin the night of unwary visitors whose parked cars were stickerless at ten seconds past 7:00 p.m.
This is not your Beach Boys’ California any more.
State and local governments in California have gone to war with people who simply want the freedom, comfort and safety of a private vehicle for transportation, one that has air-conditioning to keep out L.A.’s summer heat and locking doors to keep out L.A.’s year-round criminals.
Given the city’s increasingly Soviet-style government, this may one day be a luxury reserved for government officials and the power brokers who put them in their jobs.
The rest of the population will be coerced out of driving by the aggravation or high cost of finding parking at the other end of the trip.
But will they ride transit?
It has long been a government conceit that it is imperative to “get people out of their cars,” one way or another. From unused car-pool lanes, to tax increases to fund transit construction, to “transit-oriented development,” to financial penalties for building housing that is judged to increase “vehicle miles traveled,” every policy aimed at increasing transit ridership has failed.
Today, public transit in California is a sewer into which your money is flushed.
A report by Marc Joffe and Athan Joshi for the California Policy Center calculates that in fiscal year 2023, taxpayers paid $10 billion to subsidize public transit systems. Operating costs are high, fare box revenue is low, taxpayers are stuck making up the difference.
If a competent private company was running the transit systems in California, we would probably see a very fast change to the current policy accommodating riders who are using the transit system as a rolling tent encampment and safe injection site. We would probably see new policies and pricing that try to attract riders with comfort and convenience.
But with the government running the transit systems, we get coercion and lectures.
The lectures are becoming ridiculous. You would never know it to listen to a California politician, but the earth’s climate is totally unaffected by the level of taxation imposed on Californians to bail out the state’s failing transit systems.
Even if the trains were safe, clean, comfortable and convenient – and they’re 0 for 4 in L.A. – transit can’t accommodate all the transportation needs of a typical California household. Transit doesn’t always go where people need to be, and not many will walk, bike or ride an e-scooter half-a-mile to a transit stop.
So it’s likely that most people who live in new housing developments in Los Angeles will have cars. Where will they park? Wherever they can. And many places they can’t.
It will be a golden age for tow truck drivers.
And glorious for the politicians who raise the parking fines.
Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley