The City of Palo Alto recently expanded the parking permit program of downtown Palo Alto to the Evergreen Park, Southgate, and Crescent park neighborhoods due to protests in these neighborhoods.

Palo Alto Assemblyman Tom DuBois helped lead the way for this new legislation.

“In downtown, neighborhoods blocks away from office buildings have seen parking increase to the point where their street is 100 percent parked from early morning until evening,” DuBois said. “People are afraid to leave and not be able to park when they come home.  And having people visit or a repairman stop by is difficult.”

This new legislation comes after the first implementation of the Residential Preferred Parking program that was first instituted in the fall of 2015. According to DuBois, the expansion is part of an ongoing process to refine the system and find a good balance.

“Many streets are seeing big improvement but more tweaking needs to be done… we need to continue to monitor and adjust the number and location of permits sold” Dubois said.

The newest legislation plans to reduced the number of parking permits available to 2000 and has set this number to decrease by 10 percent every year.

The city’s newest parking permit programs in the Southgate and Evergreen neighborhoods will start next year. This is aimed at stopping Palo Alto High School students from parking in the area.

“With narrow streets, the parking saturation creates big headaches for the neighborhood,” DuBois said. “The city will be rolling out a parking permit program for Southgate and Evergreen park together within a year.”

While this will reduce the number of locales where students may park, this change will ease the concerns of the residents in the area.