If you ride your bicycle along the beach path in Long Beach, you will notice three expansive views. To the south, the Pacific Ocean extends out to the horizon; along the shore, one sees the sea of sand that gives our city its name; and finally (and much less prosaically), one sees expansive fields of public parking. Indeed, all along the city’s shore, automobile parking could hardly be more convenient. Ironically, we provide parking in Long Beach that features better coastline views than those available from almost any home. Perhaps it is because of the state Coastal Commission that we think public access to the beach means being able to park nearly at the waterline. Or maybe it is our Southern California car-oriented culture that leads us to believe that an attractive destination requires parking within close proximity.
There seems to be many rationales for why there must be parking right on the shore. It is said that along the marina in downtown Long Beach, boat owners need parking so as to move cargo between their cars and their boats. Waterfront restaurants supposedly need convenient parking to compete with restaurants in the area, from Lakewood Mall to the Town Center on Carson Street. It is assumed that visitors to the Queen Mary must have easy access to parking for fear of losing business to the next historic cruise ship down the coast. Beach goers, the thinking goes, must be able to easily escape sand storms to their cars at the drop of a hat. One can always find reasons to place parking within the shortest possible distance to Long Beach’s waterfront. But at what cost do we sacrifice our waterfront for the convenience of easy parking? It reflects an unfortunate ranking of priorities when we demand expedient parking accommodations for visitors at the cost of valuable public open space or compromised views.
At this point I offer no solutions; the point is to raise awareness of our fascination with convenient parking along Long Beach’s most precious resource. Long Beach is not unique in this regard: continue south along Pacific Coast Highway and one will see that in cities like Seal Beach and Huntington Beach parking runs right along the coast, creating a constant buffer between Route 1 and the Pacific Ocean. Yet when traveling to cities like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, one finds that their waterfronts are made up of a variety of exciting pedestrian amenities. Long Beach has some of those very same attractions: the difference is that they are often isolated by swaths of asphalt. Buildings and roads created out of a sense of necessity discourage the very engagement with the waterfront they were designed to facilitate.
In the interest of stimulating further discussion, I would like to pose the following challenge to Long Beach Post readers. Given the number of parking lots located along the beach (and in other prime locations as well), the sad reality is that in Long Beach some of the best views are from the windshield of a parked automobile. Take a moment in the next couple weeks to take a photograph of that favorite view. Email those images to me and I will post those them for all to see in a future story, featuring the “Top Ten Long Beach Views from a Parking Stall.”
