Downtown Saratoga has long been considered “dead” by many students and young adults. To most, there’s not much to do, nowhere to shop and never any parking. It is always being compared to the fabulous downtown Los Gatos, which is at least twice the size and has anything anyone could ever want: diverse shopping, a variety of eateries, a central park and lots of parking lots. Saratoga’s downtown was hardly even in the running to match Los Gatos.

Our shops keep closing, people are split on the idea of vertical expansion and Wildwood Park has transformed into somewhere you may not want to walk into at night thanks to drug and alcohol use by young people. But a recent move by the city has put a nail in the coffin of our downtown’s prospects of glory.

In an attempt to beautify and create more places to relax and socialize in downtown, the city has transformed street corners into extensions of the sidewalk with benches and comely plants. The idea is that it would be nice to sit there with a friend with some Starbucks or frozen yogurt in hand.

However, there is one crucial issue with this development. I cannot go get my Starbucks or frozen yogurt that I would sit and enjoy because there is much less parking than before.

All of those lovely street parking spots that were previously available are basically gone. To create these social points on the sidewalk, the pedestrian area had to expand into the street. Now the only parking is in the lot near the old supermarket, behind the village square or behind La Fondue.

But again, some more issues arise. More than one third of the parking behind La Fondue is valet parking 24 hours a day and parking by the old supermarket is restrictive to those shops only. Also, there are no time limits to these parking spots, so they have to potential to be filled all day long. The old street parking used to be two hours only. Now if there are no time limited spots, there is even less of a chance that someone will be leaving shortly.

Although the city’s attempts to bring business back to downtown are laudable, their renovations are also detrimental to customers actually coming downtown. The only way to get business is to have parking that is readily available.

Time is money, and if it is easier to park in Los Gatos than Saratoga, that is where people are going to go. Unless Saratoga adds extra parking lots or finds another solution to this problem, more people will avoid the frustration of having to park blocks away and choose somewhere else to spend both their time and money.