Guest Opinion | Erika Foy: Good Public Policy Should Not Be Afraid to Be Measured

I have been hearing a lot about parking lately. As the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. When you can’t find a place to park your car it can make you late, cost more money than expected, or disrupt your plans. It’s annoying at best, and dangerous at worst.

I keep a pretty close eye on Pasadena’s Design Commission agendas for reasons other than parking, but when a new report mentions ‘limited parking‘ within the first few sentences, it gets my attention fast. So when I started reading about 2000 East Colorado Boulevard, a six-story, 100-percent affordable housing project proposing 144 residential units and just 64 parking spaces, I was taken aback. Under new state law, Pasadena could not require the developer to provide a single parking space. The developer chose to provide 64; under the city’s pre-density-bonus parking ratios, the project would have required 189. You can’t ignore 64, but zero would be worse.

Seeing yet another project with reduced parking raises a significant question that Pasadena’s leadership needs to answer: What is actually happening to our transportation habits and behaviors as we build more housing with less parking? Are these state driven policies having the desired effect, or are we just creating more circling, more congestion, more pressure on neighborhood streets, and more competition for the spaces that remain?

Residents are confronting these concerns project by project, but no one in the city appears to be putting the pieces together. I have recently witnessed residents flag this issue multiple times: at a Pasadena housing committee meeting on large housing projects along Colorado Boulevard, during a discussion of a proposed seven-story apartment project on Catalina Avenue, and at the Design Commission’s consideration of the 55-and-older development at 540 South Lake Avenue.

We understand the theories driving reduced parking requirements: Parking is expensive to build (especially underground), and policies limiting available parking are intended to encourage (or coerce) people to walk, bike, and use public transportation to help address climate issues. However, these objectives are arguable if we don’t actually get people into public transit or riding their bikes. So how do we know these policies are even working?

Pasadena’s leadership must start asking whether these policies are producing their intended results; otherwise, we are just building our way toward a parking crisis. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to study parking demand before projects are approved and then measure what actually happens after these buildings are occupied, despite state mandates?

Pasadena requires transportation analysis for development projects, and many projects are also subject to Transportation Demand Management measures. But those reviews do not answer the question of parking demand. We should research how many vehicles a project is likely to generate, whether the proposed parking supply meets that demand, and what happens to surrounding neighborhoods when it doesn’t. These are questions we should be asking before a project breaks ground. Then, once a new building is occupied, we should have a way to compare projected use to real use.

I wonder: has Pasadena conducted any broader retrospective analysis of completed projects that measure actual car ownership, transit use, and parking demand? Apparently not, as Planning and Transportation have only recently started planning a workshop with the Planning Commission that would examine these things. The planned discussion may not reach the Planning Commission until winter 2027.

As these massive developments are being approved, the need for better information on parking demand is only becoming more important, and the city’s apparent lack of urgency is concerning. To be fair, these recent state laws have reduced Pasadena’s ability to impose parking requirements on many new housing developments like the ones being proposed, but less control does not mean the city should stop asking what the consequences have been to date or what they will be in the future.

My hope is Pasadena will quickly decide to look more closely at what happens on the streets surrounding these projects—comparing projections to real use, and use that data when considering applications for future developments or political discussions with our state representatives.

Residents like me should not have to become traffic experts or parking planners—or raise money to hire them—to identify impacts we see on the ground. A strong city that values its residents would anticipate, measure, and address before complaints start rolling in.

We can theoretically plan for fewer cars, but that doesn’t mean people will actually stop using them. I do hope Pasadena’s analysis ultimately shows that people living in our transit-oriented developments are choosing to forgo cars, take transit more frequently, and walk and bike more. But if studying the issue identifies unintended consequences, let’s work to acknowledge them before the problem becomes so entrenched that our choices disappear.

My hope is the city won’t simply shrug and accept more congestion, parking problems, and a diminished quality of life for its residents as the unavoidable price of growth. Join me in encouraging the city to measure what is happening before it’s too late.

Good public policy should not be afraid to be measured.