The first employer survey for the Palo Alto Transportation Management Association shows a 55% drivealone commute rate, with 45% of commuters traveling to work in some other way. 17% of downtown commuters used Caltrain, and 15% of commuters walked or biked to work. The TMA plans to use the survey data help plan investments to further reduce driving into Palo Alto downtown, where car parking is experienced as scarce, and traffic makes driving inconvenient. Read more

Palo Alto Forward's Steering Committee Letter to City of Palo Alto Council June 29th, 2015   Dear Mayor Holman and Palo Alto City Council Members: Palo Alto Forward is a resident-led, community-based group interested in crafting a vision for the future of Palo Alto that is focused on creating quality, opportunity and choice in housing and transportation. Like you, we are concerned about the proposed closure of the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park, potential eviction of 400 residents and the loss of an existing, yet scarce source of affordable housing in our community.   Read more

On Tuesday June 23, we heard from Richard Willson, a funny and engaging speaker, who explained that parking policy is the intersection of transportation, economic development, sustainability/social justice, urban design goals.  Two years ago, he wrote Parking Reform made Easy, which advocated for setting correct prices to regulate parking (a la Don Shoup, author of the High Cost of Free Parking and Willson’s PhD advisor).  His follow up book, Parking Management for Smart Growth was born from the fact most cities can't use pricing as a regulatory mechanism because they have not implemented other parking management tools first.  Palo Alto has certainly experienced this in recent years, as the economy has taken off and parking has become a scarce resource in some places. Read more

Palo Alto has a severe housing shortage: a very low rate of home construction over the last fifty years combined with the booming tech economy has given Palo Alto the highest rents in the entire United States. We’ve talked a little bit about WHY we have a housing shortage, ideas for WHERE we can place new housing, and that brings us to HOW we can encourage more housing stock. There are a lot of opaque policies and rules that govern our built environment and shape the amount of housing that we can build. For Palo Alto's last Comprehensive Plan and Housing Element, the community already came together to design new pro-housing policies. Unfortunately, they were never implemented by the City Council into new zoning rules that would allow this new housing to be built. As such, there are a number of programs from our current plans that we should consider for our new Comprehensive Plan to encourage additional housing. Read more

Palo Alto has a severe housing shortage: a very low rate of home construction over the last fifty years combined with the booming tech economy has given Palo Alto the highest rents in the entire United States. So what are the realistic options for Palo Alto to expand its housing supply? 40% of Palo Alto is open space in the foothills and baylands, another 19% is parks, and most of Palo Alto's remaining land is zoned for single-family homes. Surprisingly, Palo Alto has room to build thousands of new homes over the next fifteen years without changing the character of existing residential neighborhoods - if you know where to look. Let’s look at a few places where more homes could be built. Read more