Improving Parking in Lake Forest

While traffic has been the #1 concern of Lake Forest residents, the poor cousin has been parking. Complaints about our traffic have left little time for consideration of the parking problems in the city. Tonight at the Planning Commission meeting (7 pm) our staff will be discussion various changes to the parking regulations which are designed to improve things in the City.

If you’re like me, the idea of more regulations is bristling. I recall the lyrics –

“Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs. Do this! Don’t do that! Can’t you read the signs?”

Five Man Electrical Band

But if you read through the staff presentation, available at the City’s website, you’ll see that the city is trying to walk the fine line between flexibility and regulation.

Here are a few of the topics under discussion

Electric Charging Stations

Right now when a company puts up an electric charging station (ECS), they get no credit for having a parking spot. That means there is an extra cost to creating an ECS. So the staff is recommending that ECSs count as a parking space. Seems like a good business and environmentally friendly thing to do.

Bicycle Parking/Disabled Parking

It seems that big brother’s big brother has designs on what we can do with our bicycle parking and disabled parking, so rather than have to constantly revise our own standards, the staff is wisely recommending that our standard simply refer to the standard we are forced to adhere to anyway, saving everyone time and money.

Drive-throughs

Fast food drive-throughs are a way of life. For reasons that are probably unfathomable, sometimes you wait and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes the line is so long you can’t even enter it, and sometimes you can drive right to the front.

The city proposes to try to regulate this with minimum required lengths, but I suspect this is a futile exercise because the length of a line is impacted by many variables, so that “one size fits all” isn’t going to work. The city proposes to work around this by saying that the minimums will not preclude an “alternate standard” and I think that’s a good compromise.

Motorcycle Parking

It’s interesting that motorcycle parking has escaped the notice of city and state regulators (Has no one seen “The Wild One?”). Well it’s now come under study in Lake Forest and the city proposes to regulate the dimensions, as well as declaring their existence “optional”. Sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me.

Summary

If you’re interested in any of these issues, or parking in general, you might want to come to the Planning Commission tonight. But don’t worry. If you miss tonight’s meeting, the entire matter will be brought back to the Commission in a few weeks once the staff have revised their report based on tonight’s feedback from the Commission.