Editorials

Limited parking makes sense on University

The town council has made substantial progress toward making the holidays less stressful for downtown merchants, residents and shoppers. Included in the commitments made by the council at the Aug. 28 meeting was the paving of the Miles Avenue parking lot, creating angled parking in various locations, increasing the hours for parking enforcement and providing valet parking.

There are still some measures left to decide. The least costly, but perhaps most volatile, is opening University Avenue in the Edelen neighborhood to some limited parking. The issue is volatile because those who live there have fought long and hard to keep parking restricted to residents only.

But restricting parking completely on University contributed last holiday season to increased traffic congestion in the Almond Grove area.

A long-term decision on whether parking on that street should continue restricted to residents only can come later. For this upcoming holiday season, there ought to be a way to let these downtown residents contribute to a solution. Certainly on any given week day, there are very few cars parked here. There was talk last year of allowing employee parking, but that would keep cars parked in the same place all day.

A better strategy might be to determine how many residents actually use the street for parking during the hours when residents tend not to be home, and limit residential restrictions to that many spaces. The rest of the spaces could fill a need for two-hour parking that would allow for shopping and dining and encourage turnover at the same time.

Swanson expansion will be a tough call

The town will face a tough decision when it has to determine whether to permit a major expansion of Swanson Ford, an automobile dealership that's been a part of the Los Gatos community since 1938. The dealership not only has history on its side, it has economics. The town realizes a large percentage of its sales tax revenue from auto dealers.

Still, the opinions of neighbors carry a lot of weight here, and the neighbors are not happy. They claim Swanson Ford already violates the conditions of its use permit and that current renovation plans will bring them more noise, fumes and even brighter lights.

Swanson counters that the current design is the only one that makes good business sense.

Clearly what's called for is a greater effort on the part of Swanson to work with neighborhood concerns. We can't think that Bruce Swanson's remark in a letter in the planning department file about Commissioner Len Pacheco designing the building and the town issuing "a bond to pay for the new World Trade Center" can do much to bring about a good solution.

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