Mountain View Downtown Parking Strategy

The Downtown Parking Strategy helped City staff and Council members to understand complex parking supply and demand challenges in a new light and to begin moving forward with solutions after years of planning inertia.

Downtown Mountain View is a vibrant, walkable, mixed-use district comprising restaurants, retail, service, and office uses, anchored by a performing arts center and transit hub. In recent years, an influx of new office developments and a shift from retail to restaurant uses added pressure to the parking system, revealing new challenges.

Nelson\Nygaard studied parking supply, demand, utilization, and management practices in Downtown. Newly collected data and historic data were compared to help the City understand the ongoing parking impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis revealed that the City lacked critical parking tools, policies, and resources to manage parking assets efficiently. Building on these key findings, we collaborated with City staff to develop a comprehensive toolkit of strategies and recommendations as well as an implementation roadmap to help the City move forward with solutions. Our recommendations addressed parking regulations, pricing, shared parking, TDM opportunities, municipal code components, development requirements, and organizational needs.

While previous plans and studies had pointed to some of the same challenges and opportunities, Nelson\Nygaard’s comprehensive approach and accessible, graphics-rich deliverables amplified the impact of our work.

The Downtown Parking Strategy helped City staff and Council members to understand complex parking supply and demand challenges in a new light and to begin moving forward with solutions after years of planning inertia. After reviewing and adopting the Downtown Parking Strategy, the City began implementing our phased recommendations in fall 2021.