City Council to discuss options to increase parking in Piedmont’s Civic Center
March 14, 2025
The City Council will begin a discussion about how public parking is allocated and configured in Piedmont’s Civic Center at their March 17, 2025 meeting, with the aim of providing the best possible experience for visitors to the Civic Center.
City Council meeting: Civic Center Parking
March 17, 2025, 6pm
Piedmont City Hall, 120 Vista Avenue
Zoom: piedmont-ca-gov.zoom.us/j/82500567382
Agenda | Staff Report
As a starting point for discussion, City staff have prepared a “maximum” parking scenario, which demonstrates what it would look like to provide the greatest possible number of public parking spaces while complying with applicable laws.
Features of the “maximum” parking scenario include:
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Converting Bonita Avenue between Vista and Oakland Avenues into one-way traffic: The loading zone would be removed, and existing on-street parking spaces on the Havens Elementary side of the street would be converted to diagonal parking. This would create an additional 17 spaces, including 2 ADA spaces.
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Converting temporary parking on Highland Avenue to permanent parking: 16 temporary spaces were added on Highland between Sierra and Sheridan Avenues to mitigate parking loss during pool construction.
The “maximum” parking scenario would provide a total of 396 public parking spaces, including 16 compliant ADA spaces, along Bonita, Hillside, Highland, Magnolia, and Vista Avenues. The scenario does not consider any changes to residential permit parking in the Civic Center.
This scenario is intended to facilitate discussion only, and no action will be taken at the meeting. The agenda item serves as an opportunity for the Council to discuss, with input from the community, how best to balance competing demands for parking in a constrained area. The Council is expected to provide preliminary guidance to staff for discussion and action at a later date.
A recent community survey on parking in the Civic Center received nearly 500 responses. Roughly half of respondents reported that they found parking in the area either “somewhat” or “very” difficult.
This discussion follows several years of disruption to historical parking distribution in the Civic Center area, beginning with the construction of the new STEAM building and theater on the Piedmont High School campus, when “Permit A” restrictions were added to existing parking spaces along Magnolia. An additional 57 spaces were lost in 2023 when construction began on the new community pool. Further spaces were removed or redesignated in summer 2024 to accommodate construction on the Police Department’s new 9-1-1 dispatch center.