One Project Finished, Santa Monica Turns Attention to Parking

By DEBORAH BELGUM

Staff Reporter

After a year of ripped-up streets and completion of a $15 million Transit Mall near Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica officials are embarking on the next step in attracting more shoppers and holding onto the ones who are losing patience.

A $92 million “Park Once” project to add 1,700 new parking spaces to the current 5,180 public parking inventory begins in December. The 37-year-old Santa Monica Library at 6th Street and Santa Monica Boulevard will be torn down and replaced with a new building, including a subterranean parking garage that will have 250 parking spaces. Shoppers will be able to park at the library, hop on a shuttle and quickly get around the downtown area. The library project should take about two years to complete.

The Transit Mall, which was a year in the making, is a six-square-block area bounded by Ocean Avenue, Broadway, Seventh Street and Santa Monica Boulevard. It now has widened sidewalks, dedicated bus lanes and electric touch-screen kiosks that give visitors information on restaurants, hotels, stores and bus schedules in the city. The electric shuttle, which costs 25 cents and stops every 15 minutes at the Promenade, Santa Monica Place, the beach, Santa Monica Pier and Main Street, will have an expanded route to the library when that project is completed.

Because visitors are sometimes perplexed about where to find parking when they enter the downtown area, the city will place electronic signs near the 4th and 5th street off-ramps of the Santa Monica Freeway telling drivers which parking structures are vacant.

Parking is a common complaint of shoppers and other visitors to the downtown area, especially on weekends during the summer. “Most of the parking structures fill up way too fast,” said Damien Bueno, a store manager at Diesel, a clothing store on Third Street Promenade. “It’s usually the first complaint we hear, that and the homeless.”

Three of the city’s 10 parking structures that are badly designed or damaged during the 1994 Northridge earthquake will be torn down and rebuilt. The ground floors will be used for retail space. Another three parking structures on 2nd and 4th streets will be upgraded so cars can move in and out faster.

Eventually another two parking structures with 1,000 parking spaces will be built somewhere on 5th Street, accommodating the expansion of the downtown area toward the east.