Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Editorials

Phantom bike lanes a dangerous solution

First there were phantom parking spaces in downtown Los Gatos. Now Los Gatos Boulevard can boast phantom bike lanes. By now, most Los Gatans know that downtown business owners help ease the parking crunch by buying spaces through a parking assessment district.

Someday, those funds might purchase real parking spaces, say, in a new parking garage. For now, though, many of the parking spaces that have been purchased are actually parking credits--known in some circles as phantom parking spaces.

The Town Council has now come up with the notion of unmarked bike lanes along Los Gatos Boulevard, an attempt to appease bicyclists without totally alienating the auto dealers who have actively opposed bike lanes on the street where they do business.

Bike lanes have been a part of the Los Gatos Boulevard plan from the earliest planning stages several years ago.

Auto dealers fear that their customers would find bike lanes a nuisance and do their shopping out of town at one of several auto rows in the valley.

In the best of all possible worlds, a compromise produces a win-win situation.

This compromise looks to us like a lose-lose situation. And a potentially dangerous one.

Lanes will become more narrow, but the right-hand lane, if it is not striped for a bike lane, will end up bigger than it currently is. Without a stripe or a sign warning of a bike lane, how are drivers--particularly those who don't live here--to know that they are sharing the lane with bicyclists?

Instead of making more room for bicyclists and less for cars, the town may be creating a no-man's land in the right-hand lanes where both bicyclists and automobile drivers enjoy a false sense of security.

If the lane widths are going to be reduced, the town should alert drivers with signage and striping that they should expect to share the road with bicyclists.

Give valet a try

The town's gift to downtown merchants and those who come to town to shop this year is valet parking. Town officials and merchants alike have wrestled for years with the parking problem in town.

Although there's much talk about paid parking in public lots, no one seems ready to bite the bullet. No one wants to risk offending shoppers and sending them to malls, where parking is free.

The town agreed to valet, in part, because the renovation work at Old Town has eliminated 105 parking spaces.

We believe shoppers and diners will welcome the opportunity to have someone else worry about finding parking for them. And at $4, the price is right.

Let's hope that this little foray into paid parking will be the first step toward finding a long-term solution to downtown parking.

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