Alameda's new aquatic center should have paid parking

The City of Alameda — specifically ARPD (the city's recreation and parks department) — is approaching final plans for a city-own aquatic center, and this final phase of planning is getting contentious. The current debate is between two pools that would better support recreational swimming and one larger pool that would better support competitive swimming. But there's also a debate that isn't happening — and that I think should happen: how much parking new parking should be built for this facility? and should it be offered for free to people who choose to drive to this facility

This blog post argues that since ARPD is already following the logic of "cost recovery," then ARPD should also put a price on any parking spots constructed as part of the aquatic center. The price for parking should be set by ARPD staff on a regular basis, and revenues from the parking should go into the same account as other revenues from people paying to swim and groups paying to rent the facility — to go toward operations and improvement of the facility. Finally, this blog post argues that as a large owner-operator of public facilities around Alameda, ARPD is lagging in terms of addressing how people access their facilities by foot/bike/transit/car — and that just as ARPD is hiring expert consultants for many aspects of the aquatic center, ARPD should hire a TDM (transportation demand management) firm to provide its staff with advice on both planning and operational issues across many ARPD facilities and programs.

The aquatic center

The aquatic center will be located on a portion of the land known as the Jean Sweeney Open Space Park. (The contradictions in naming a place both an "open space" preserve and a recreational "park" are topics for another blog post). This aquatic center will be the first pool(s) owned and operated solely by the City of Alameda for residents and the wider public. The aquatic center effort was launched with $30mm of the city's General Fund — thanks both to increases in the real-estate transfer tax starting around 2020 and with $28,679,908 from the Biden/Harris administration's American Rescue Plan Act.

Logics of "design-build" and "cost recovery"

This aquatic center project is an illustration of how public facilities are planned, constructed, and operated by local governments in 21st century California — that is, in this imperfect world in which Proposition 13 highly constrains the horizons of possibilities:

• The capital (construction) portion of the project is being handled as a "design-build" project. That means the same firms hired to design the project are also going to be responsible for building the project. In theory, this aligns all the parties' incentives — so the designers of the project are compelling to keep their plans affordable, otherwise their colleagues responsible for the building phase will object. The entire project is bid at a fixed cost, so the cost of the project is capped — and all parties have an incentive to realize the project under those constraints. (For example, ARPD recently announced that $1mm of this budget may need to go to previously unexpected engineering work related to the soil conditions of the site — so following the logic of "design build" ARPD's latest survey for input asks the public to rank nice things to eliminate from the design to free up $1mm for the soils work.)
• The operations portion of this project is being handled in the "cost recovery" paradigm. Just as young people at an Occupy Wall Street protest may have once spoken of the hegemony of the logic of capitalism, so much of how public services operate in California these days can be explained through the lens of cost recovery. It's not that ARPD is a business that wants to make a profit — rather, it's that Alameda's City Council, its City Manager, and most importantly, the voters of Alameda do not want to give ARPD enough money to cover the cost of grass for soccer fields and grooming for softball infields and paying someone a salary to empty the trash cans after a weekend's worth of picnics. These costs are instead borne by the users of the services — so families that want to reserve a picnic spot in the park pay a reservation fee to ARPD (to cover some or all of the cost of the clean up) and youth sports leagues pay fees to ARPD (to cover some or all of the cost of the labor and materials required to maintain the fields).

One pool or two pools?

ARPD staff, the city's Recreation and Parks Commission, and ultimately City Council are currently confronting the question of whether to build one pool or two pools at the aquatic center.

Here are the options as described and illustrated in ARPD's survey that is currently open for resident and stakeholder input:

What's most interesting for the purposes of this blog post is how ARPD is framing this choice — through the lens of "cost recovery":

The City has retained Bay Area Economic Associates to compare the hypothetical revenue and expense streams for a Two-Pool Aquatic Center versus a Single 50-meter Pool Aquatic Center. The Two-Pool Aquatic Center will have a net income of $660K annually on $2.01 million in annual expenses. The 50-meter Pool Aquatic Center will have a net loss of income of $80K annually on $1.13 million in annual expenses. These numbers do not include the Debt Service of $895k.

In our previous community engagement efforts, 75% of all collected data has shown that the community prefers the two-pool scheme. Respondents noted that such a facility supports a broad range of aquatics programming while also addressing the needs of a broader user base than that of a 50-meter Pool Aquatic Center. However, deciding between a two-pool scheme or a 50m pool is a big decision. Therefore with the additional information we have collected on operational expenses, we wanted to ask the community to vote again on your pool concept preference.

To translate:

• With two pools, ARPD's consultant is estimating that they will sell more entry tickets and swim lessons and pool rentals. While the cost to maintain and staff the two pools will be higher, the higher revenues are estimated to more than cover the additional operational costs.
• With a single larger pool, ARPD's consultant is estimating that the type of individual swimmers that want to swim laps and the groups that want to rent the facility to hold meets in an Olympic-sized swimming pool will not provide ARPD with as much in total revenue. The number of simultaneous paying users of the single pool will likely also be lower. While operating costs for the one pool will be lower, the revenues will also be lower, such as they don't fully cover the expenses.

In the language of a hypothetical grad students at an Occupy protest, the neutral logic of cost-recovery is being used to mask a "normative" question. ARPD could find $80,000 in its annual budget to cover the gap in operational expenses for the single pool if — and this is the big "if" — we want the single Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Ultimately, these are questions about what kind of aquatic center should be built and which residents and stakeholders should it primarily serve. These are not just quantitative questions to answer, but they are contentious questions to answer 'cause they'll leave some people unhappy.

Parking as a shared resource

In the early stages of the aquatic center planning process, ARPD explored sharing existing parking lots with neighboring offices. Given that much of the aquatic center usage would be on weekends and non-work offices, this would seem to be compatible with the existing use of the office parking lots. Sharing of parking lots is a well-established means to reduce the need for new parking lots... but it can feel legally and politically complex. Two or more parties do need to agree to the terms of sharing parking, and they both need to feel comfortable that they can live together. Something changed within ARPD in recent years — maybe related to the change of the department's leadership — and now ARPD is proposing to build its own parking lot for the aquatic center.

The new parking lot will be built on land that's currently part of the Jean Sweeney Open Space Park:

Bike Walk Alameda has recently written a letter to City Council articulating the need for ARPD to evaluate more closely how much parking is being proposed to be built as park of the aquatic center project (and other ARPD facilities and parks):

How will we achieve our climate and safety goals if we keep building large
parking lots [...] that encourage more driving? We believe these projects would benefit from focused conversations around transportation impacts, with city targets in mind. Ideally, a transportation demand management plan would be created and reviewed by the Transportation Commission, the Planning Board, and/or other bodies that have familiarity with these issues.

Specifically regarding the Aquatic Center, for example, there’s been no formal discussion about the size of the parking lot, which is now nearly twice as large as the original one planned for this area. A parking lot this size, offering free parking, is likely to induce driving private vehicles over other forms of transportation, despite the site’s very bike- and transit-friendly location. Does it need to be this big? Ultimately, it may be necessary for a number of reasons, but we believe more discussion would serve us well.

Several years ago, Council rescinded our minimum parking requirements for commercial and residential developments. Council recognized that expansive parking increases auto trips and congestion, and discourages mode shift. However, we understand that the pool’s parking lot size is based on some other aquatic-specific parking formula. It’s concerning that we’ve essentially just replaced one set of minimum parking requirements with another one here.

To turn this into a concrete suggestion and request: Just like any other owner-operator of a facility that attracts a lot of people — like shopping center owners and developers of offices and multi-family residential complexes — ARPD should hire a TDM consulting firm and have then on-call for the aquatic complex and all future larger projects.

ARPD's current survey discusses reducing the aquatic center's environmental impact by using electricity for heating. Another way to reduce the aquatic center's environmental impact: Encourage more people to travel to the aquatic center by foot, bike, transit, and carpool. That's what a TDM consultant could help ARPD and the aquatics center team to figure out.

Charging for parking

While there are many forms of TDM that could be relevant to the aquatic center, there's one in particular that I think will be most relevant to the project at this stage of planning. It's most relevant because it fits within the logic of cost recovery. Charge for parking at the aquatics center.

By charging for parking at the new aquatic center — and deciding to do so as part of the financial modeling at this stage of the project — ARPD can:

• Revenue: Add another revenue stream, to complement fees paid by individuals and by groups.
• Equity: By charging for parking, ARPD could reduce the cost of admission for recreational swim and classes. This could make the pool and its programs more accessible to people and households with fewer resources and ones who don't own or use a car to get around Alameda.
• Cross Alameda Trail: Gently encourage swimmers to arrive using the Cross Alameda Trail (which runs right next to the aquatic center) or by transit. For those who need or want to drive by car, they still can.
• Disabled access: Note that just as drivers with handicap permits get free on-street parking, they could be offered free (or reduced cost) parking in the aquatic center lot.
• Dynamic pricing for events: ARPD will have the ability to change the price of parking depending upon the day and the context. For example, if a large group rents out the entire facility for a swim meet, ARPD could increase the price of parking on that day — to further incentivize swim-meet participants to carpool or to arrange their own vans/buses.
• Data-informed decision-making: By charging for parking, ARPD will have ongoing measurements of the usage of the parking lot. This information can help to inform future TDM efforts by ARPD and other city departments and to adjust the price of parking over time.

Do I want to pay for parking at the aquatics center? No. But I would definitely appreciate the option to take my kids there by bike and to receive a slightly lower cost of entry for recreational swim. When I took one of my kids to swim lessons at Emma Hood (Alameda High) Swim Center, sometimes I took her by bike and sometimes by car. The choice was mainly decided by the weather that day — whether it was warm enough that she'd be comfortable in a towel on the back of my bike. On the cold days when we drove, I found hunting for a parking space to be a challenge — I would have actually appreciated being able to pay a bit to have dependable odds of getting a spot. In the grand scheme of things, I think the aquatic center will actually be more usable for more people if that new parking lot comes with some amount of a cost.

At least speaking from my own experience, what matters most about paid parking is how easy — or hard — it is to do the transaction to pay for it. Do you have to walk to a separate kiosk, tap a bunch of buttons, then walk back to your car to put a piece of paper on the dashboard, all before actually walking into the aquatic center? Or could you instead just pay for parking at the entry window at the same time as you pay your swimming fee? The latter is so much easier, especially if you are also holding the hands of a kid or two or three. There are even more seamless and high-tech parking payments systems available on the market now that read license plates and integrate into ticketing and reservation systems. However it's done, paying for parking should be as simple and seamless as possible.

While ARPD staff and the Rec and Park Commission need to make a challenging decision about whether to build two pools or a single larger pool, I hope they'll also take this feedback about how to better integrate this nice new facility into Alameda's overall approach to sustainable transportation: hire a TDM consultant, put a price on parking at the pool(s), and lower the cost of entry to the pool(s).