In a recent blog post, Mark Dinan wrote about the upcoming July 8, 2025 City Council second reading of the residential parking permit (RPP) program ordinance.

East Palo Alto has a parking problem. We have too many cars. In some neighborhoods, it is very hard to find parking. Many people have told me that they can’t invite their friends over because there is no street parking available. I did a Facebook poll a few months

To learn from what other cities have done, I looked over the San Francisquito Creek at the City of Palo Alto's RPP program.

Residential preferential parking (RPP) programs and districts are intended to restore and enhance the quality of life in residential neighborhoods by reducing the impact of parking associated with nearby businesses and institutional uses. The City of Palo Alto currently has 6 RPP districts in operation. (Source)

Palo Alto's 6 residential parking permit programs in aggregate cover around 44 miles of roads, which is slightly greater than the 38.8 centerline miles of roads in East Palo Alto. Therefore, the scale and cost at which Palo Alto's RPP operates could theoretically be translated linearly to East Palo Alto's potential RPP.

In this post, I simply wanted to share the number of miles of roads in each of the RPPs in Palo Alto. To do this data analysis, I downloaded roads from theUnited States Census Bureau for Santa Clara County, split the road segments in QGIS software, added a column for length_meters, and imported the exported kml file into FourSquare Studio.

Crescent Park

6.74 miles of roads (I tried to match this map)

Evergreen Park-Mayfield

7 miles (rounded down since an internal road was included in the count which shouldn’t have been)

Downtown Palo Alto

22 miles (rounding down since some private roads are in the dataset)

Southgate

2.09 miles

Old Palo Alto

1.99 miles

College Terrace

4.4 miles

Conclusion

If East Palo Alto were to hypothetically implement a citywide residential parking permit program, it would not be that big when compared to other cities. A citywide parking permit program for us would be smaller than Palo Alto's entire RPP network. Our City staff should meet with Palo Alto's to learn from how they manage their system.