Far from discouraging driving, this makes driving more convenient for shopping trips. It is a step backwards.

I agree with you, I’d like to see lots of car parking removed to create bike lanes. (Oak Street between Baker and Scott, anyone?) I’ve heard there’s a lot of this happening in Paris, too, very successfully.

The main advantage to charging more and longer for parking in a livable streets context is that it will make owning a car more inconvenient and expensive, thus pushing some people to get rid of their car altogether. Which in turn would mean less cars needing to be parked.

It’s too bad we can’t charge parking by car size. If all the ginormous SUVs and vans in San Francisco were turned into Honda Fits, we’d need about half the parking we do in the city.

The _only_ problem solved through market-rate pricing at the meters would be increased utilization and convenience of the curbside parking for shoppers. That, in turn, leads to greater incentive for car trips and greater traffic. Whatever revenue might be earned is too marginal to help Muni (in the unlikely event those funds were even made available to transit).

Really, the discussion needs to be not how much to charge at these meters, but why have curbside parking there at all. In a place like Amsterdam or Copenhagen, that parking would have been removed to make way for bike lanes.

I am all for extending parking meter hours as long as you could plug the meters for four hours at a time–long enough for dinner and a movie/symphony/opera/whatever. One hour parking in the evening is cruel.

Meanwhile, 24th St has loads of metered parking that sees high turnover until 6 PM, when residents fill those spots and leave their cars overnight (this is somewhat mitigated by the every other day street cleaning that happens early in the AM, but suffice to say those spots aren’t of much use to Whole Foods or the other businesses on 24th after 6 PM).

The cost of paying parking on the street compared to the typical grocery bill – nominal (and less than a MUNI fare).

Meanwhile, WF installed rack spots for 8 bikes in front of the store, an improvement from the zero rack spots in front of the store when it was Bell Market. The first two days of operation, I have ridden into the parking lot to find the racks full, with additional bikes locked to random poles and to the shopping cart corral. Random sampling of the bikes parked in the racks at Rainbow could have cast a light on whether 8 rack spots would be enough in Noe Valley.

That is one of main principles behind Shoup’s theories on parking management. Moreover, using parking ticket fines in this manner degrades public perception of the court system — meter maids become seen as nothing more than shakedown artists.

since when does someone who can afford to own a car and drive it around the densest city on the west coast qualify as “ordinary”? if you can afford the hundreds of dollars a month for a permanent parking space near your home, i think you can pay the parking meter.

newsom has confused a luxury with a basic need. (and NO, a car is NOT a basic need in this city, get real.)

It’s time to finish the job, and either split the MTA appointments or have an elected Board. I think we sustainable transportation advocates and the bus drivers’ union, working together, could muster a majority on the Board to support a shift from private cars to transit, walking, and bicycling.