Cars, cars everywhere and no place to park

By Carl Heintze

Recently I was driving down N. Santa Cruz Avenue when I had a kind of epiphany, a revelation. It was: Los Gatos is crowded.

I know this doesn't sound like an epiphany, but it was, and a scary one at that.

I've lived in and around Los Gatos most of my life and most of that time it's seemed like a quiet town up against the hills with a couple of main streets (well, a real Main street and Santa Cruz Avenue), lots of small shops, one theater and a lot of old and dignified houses.

What dawned on me during this trip that that's all true. But what also is true is that the town is crowded, just more and more crowded.

I was driving--inching would be a better way to describe it--heading south on N. Santa Cruz Avenue--it was about three o'clock in the afternoon; it was a weekday and there were just lots and lots of cars. Suddenly the street seemed a lot narrower. Indeed, all the streets I drove on that day seemed narrower.

There were more people walking on the sidewalks. When I went to look for a place to park in what used to be the Southern Pacific right-of-way there wasn't any space.

That reminded me that the previous Saturday night I had been looking for a place to park anywhere and I couldn't find one. Finally, I gave up and went home.

I know somehow this should not be surprising. We have been bombarded with stories about Santa Clara Valley traffic. Commuting is a nightmare. House prices are out of sight. There are almost no houses to buy or sell and even if there were, no one could afford them if they didn't have stock options to pay for them.

I know all this had been lurking at the edge of my consciousness, but it had just been lurking there. I hadn't really absorbed it. Moving from day to day in the same place, the changes seemed to have been gradual. Now suddenly they no longer were. It was as if I had been dropped in a foreign place, Paris perhaps, or London.

But it wasn't either of these places or New York or even San Francisco. It was a place I thought I knew pretty well and suddenly I didn't.

I couldn't figure what all those cars were doing trying to get down the street in the middle of the afternoon. For a moment I thought it was because there was some sudden emergency, as, for example, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck. I turned on my car radio and wandered around the dial, but all I got was the usual rock & roll music and the endless talk show hosts bemoaning some facet of our national problems.

So I deduced it wasn't an unusual afternoon. And that was what made it so terrifying. It was a usual afternoon. Los Gatos was crowded to the point where traffic crawled. The town had not gotten any bigger. It was still a town. In fact, physically it was still the town of 20 or 30 or in some respects even 50 years ago. But the number of people trying to drive through it, to walk on its streets and use its shops had increased to the bursting point.

That was what scared me. Because I couldn't see how the town was going to get any bigger. Built against the hills as it is, there is no way for it to expand upward or out into the flat land toward Campbell. The streets aren't going to get any wider, at least not without tearing out a lot of the existing buildings (not likely).

There just doesn't seem to be any way that the number of people in town is going to be able to keep on growing much longer without something drastic happening.

Perhaps we could build a couple of very large high-rise parking lots at the edge of town and let everyone walk. Perhaps we could increase the height limit of the buildings in downtown (thereby cutting off the view of the mountains, one of the chief reasons why people want to live in Los Gatos) or we could put up gates at the edge of town and only let so many persons in on any one afternoon.

None of these measures, all fanciful and unlikely ever to take place, is going to solve the problem of a town that's faced with having to handle more people and more cars than it can.

So my epiphany, while revealing, is not very instructional. We are stuck with a dilemma, the same dilemma which all of California in one way or another is facing. We have too many people for what's available to serve them. The latest population estimates are that we are growing at the rate of half a million persons a year. We're bigger than many small nations. We are, in fact, too big.

There's not enough water, nor sewage disposal nor housing nor roads nor freeways nor land for us all.

That was my epiphany of when I drove through Los Gatos recently, my afternoon nightmare. I wish I could awake from it, but so far I haven't been able to do so.

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident.

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