Streetsblog San Francisco

An SFMTA plan to put a rational price on car parking around the developing Mission Bay area has run into fierce backlash from residents and merchants from the Potrero Hill, Dogpatch and northeastern Mission neighborhoods.

The SFPark program’s Mission Bay Parking Management Strategy is “meant to address the existing severe parking availability issues and to get ready for the future,” said SFPark Manager Jay Primus, who sat in on a three-hour hearing on the plan at City Hall today. “These are neighborhoods where we’re going to see the majority of the city’s growth in the years to come.”

The plan was approved for recommendation to the SFMTA Board of Directors, save for a few blocks which the hearing officers recommended for re-evaluation.

Included in the plan’s Mission Bay “Parkingshed” area are existing and planned developments that are drawing more and more commuters, including the University of California San Francisco, AT&T Park, and Caltrain stations at 22nd and Fourth Streets. It also encompasses impacted “buffer areas” like the Dogpatch and Potrero Hill neighborhoods, and SFPark expansions are also planned in the Mission around a park that’s set to replace a parking lot at 17th and Folsom Streets.

But among the complaints, residents defended subsidized free parking, claiming meters would impose an undue burden on drivers in areas with poor access to transit and more residential and industrial uses than retail.

“No doubt these are complex neighborhoods,” said Primus, “but they’re predominantly commercial, mixed-use PDR [production, distribution and repair] areas. That doesn’t mean that MTA should leave this parking utterly unmanaged. This is parking that is close to BART, Third Street light rail, and that businesses depend on for their economic vitality.”

But even some supporters of SFPark, like Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association President Tony Kelley, criticized the SFMTA for a lack of outreach to neighbors.

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It’s too soon in the development of SFPark to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of demand-responsive pricing on parking habits, says the SFMTA’s Jay Primus, who manages the SFPark program.

Primus got in touch yesterday when the Streetsblog Network highlighted a blog post from Michael Perkins at Greater Greater Washington which claimed that the results of the experiment, which began in April, are showing that “prices affect parking less than San Francisco expected.”

“To date,” wrote Perkins, “the most crowded blocks have typically continued to be crowded even after adjusting the prices upward, while under-occupied blocks have not filled up even after dropping the price.”

Primus responded in the comments and spoke with Streetsblog to address points raised by Perkins and other readers. “The ‘expectations’ that Michael wrote of are his own,” Primus said. It’s also worth pointing out that Perkins’ post didn’t include any specific data or sources that support his assertion.

“SFMTA has taken a very empirical approach with SFPark,” said Primus, “and this is a demonstration project that is just getting started, so it’s a little early to say how well it’s working, especially without proper analysis and evaluation.”

See the full statement from Primus after the break:

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Year after year, the champions of free car parking come to defend its sanctity when the SF Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) works up the guts to raise the issue in its search for budget solutions.

As surely as drivers will cruise endlessly for coveted free parking spots every Sunday, opponents like San Francisco Examiner’s Ken Garcia will attempt to stifle calls for the expansion of metered parking hours.

Unfortunately, public discourse on the issue is repeatedly timed with the SFMTA’s budget deadline, helping to feed the widespread misconception that pricing parking is nothing more than a money grab and obscuring its potential as a sorely overdue solution for rationalizing the use of our streets.

In his column yesterday, Garcia called for squashing once and for all the “tired” practice of using cars as “roving cash machines.”

Nevermind that San Francisco is already resorting to general fund bonds to pave the streets in lieu of payments from the motor vehicle owners who wear them down. To Garcia, putting a rational price on parking spaces is “a kind of ‘gouge and go’ philosophy to get city transportation planners off the hook for their bosses’ inability to run their own department efficiently.” Unfortunately, Mayor Ed Lee went along with Garcia’s rant.

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San Francisco launched the world’s most innovative parking pilot today, a federally-funded trial that promises to revolutionize the way cities manage and price metered curb parking. SFPark will make it easier for motorists to find spaces in busy commercial districts, while reducing congestion, speeding Muni, and improving air quality and safety for bicyclists and pedestrians.

The milestone for SFPark was celebrated at a packed press conference in the North Light Court at City Hall this morning. SFMTA Chief Nat Ford was joined by Mayor Ed Lee, parking guru and UCLA Professor Donald Shoup, and other dignitaries to announce the SFPark iPhone application and real-time parking availability data.

The demand-based parking pilot is being implemented over the coming months, covering 7,000 of the city’s 28,800 metered spaces and 12,250 garage spaces. Drivers, thanks to street sensors, or magnetometers, will be able to check their iPhone application (an app will be available for Android in the coming weeks), or computer, to get real-time data on the availability and cost of parking spaces in 15 commercial districts.

“How many of you have been dumb in your past? How many you have acted dumb? I know I have,” said Mayor Lee. “You know, when you’re driving around looking for a parking space and you’re double parking and you’re running around trying to see whether something will open, you’re dumb.”

“We want to be less dumb about this, and that’s why I’m so happy to launch today’s pilot program, SFPark,” Lee said. “That’s going to be our San Francisco version of congestion pricing.”

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Anyone who wants to use a parking space with a broken meter in San Francisco today is allowed to park for free as long as the posted time limit allows. Given that kind of incentive, some people who drive are finding ways to break meters on a daily basis in order to avoid paying.

As the SFPark program fully launches March 1 and implements direct demand-based parking pricing on a quarter of the city’s meters, time limits will be increased to four hours or eliminated altogether with the aim of facilitating more convenient parking, encouraging payment compliance, and reducing enforcement labor.

However, under the current broken meter policy, some drivers may find more incentive to disable meters and take advantage of the longer time limits. In order to avoid such an unintended consequence, the SFMTA Board’s Policy and Governance Committee has agreed to set a standard two-hour maximum limit at broken meters, something that must still be approved by the full board.

According to a policy report presented by SFMTA CFO Sonali Bose, between 300 to 500 parking meters are broken on any given day, and 80 to 90 percent of those are due to vandalism. While that may only amount to 1 to 3 percent of the city’s meters, Sustainable Streets Director Bond Yee said about 60 percent of those are repaired within the first day and 96 percent within three days, no small feat for repair crews.

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While the full results of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority's (SFCTA) congestion pricing plan, the SF Mobility, Access, and Pricing Study (SFMAPS), have not yet been released, the agency will hold a series of public meetings starting next week to discuss the general principles of congestion pricing and how it could work in San Francisco. At the public meetings, the SFCTA will detail several possible scenarios to charge drivers for driving into San Francisco's downtown during peak periods, a prospect that should spark significant public and media debate.

In the best-case scenario, the SFCTA predicts raising $80 million for transit and non-driving mobility options like bicycling and pedestrian improvements, with traffic reductions of up to 12 percent, emissions reductions up to 16 percent and transit speed improvements of up to 20 percent.

While these numbers sound great, the agency still has to convince a lot of people about the benefits of congestion pricing, including Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was an early advocate for the concept, but who is not so sure now is a good time to try it.

"I've worked very hard to promote this construct, but I want to do it in a thoughtful and judicious way and I want to do it in a way that's not going to hurt the economic growth of this city at a time when we're trying to recruit companies and trying to recruit people," Newsom told Streetsblog. "We have a lot more work to do on that. We need a lot more outreach, a lot more consensus."

"I'm not ideologically opposed by any stretch," added Newsom, but "I'm not sure this is the right time to be having this debate."

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Very little is as emotional in city-government policy making as parking and today's San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency hearing on the addition of 1310 new meters was no exception.

For two and a half hours, the public by-and-large lambasted the proposals to add new meters anywhere in the nine zones throughout the city, often falling back on rhetoric one might expect reserved for the trial of a violent criminal suspect. 

The SFMTA was accused of using meters to dismantle the middle class, to make drivers feel like parasites, to repress poor people, to institute a regressive tax, to do away with a good tradition of free parking, to increase the risk of rape because people will have to park further from their homes, and to generally destroy the quality of life and well being of San Franciscans.

SFMTA hearing officer John Noland and Chief Transportation Planner Jack Fleck listened attentively to the testimony, before recommending approval of nearly every one of the staff recommendations for the new meters.

Before the hearing started, Fleck explained that the proposal for new meters was significantly more than the 300-400 meters the SFMTA adds each year to the streets, but they were being proposed for areas of high-density residential and mixed-use commercial zoning where demand for parking on-street had outstripped supply, and thus it was necessary to better manage parking by pricing it properly.

"The idea is that the parking meters will be available for you, the visitor or residents," said Fleck. "The goal is to make parking available; it's not to make it so restrictive that people don't come."

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Editor's note: This will be Michael Rhodes' last regular post as a reporter for Streetsblog. He's leaving us for an urban planning career, but hopes to occasionally contribute columns like this in the future.

Clement Street. Sunday. Noon. Drivers are circling around the block in their cars, looking out with hawk's eyes for a parking space, often oblivious to the people on foot of all ages who give Clement its bustle.

The parking spaces on Clement are free in a monetary sense -- it's Sacred Sunday, after all -- but there's hardly a "free" spot to be found, as the under-priced curb gives an incentive to claim that space Saturday night.

One question for each of the supervisors and the Mayor, all of whom have some say over the matter, is: If the city doesn't provide free seats on the bus on Sundays, why does it provide free public parking spaces?

There are some very good reasons the city doesn't provide free bus rides on Sundays -- or evenings, for that matter. For Muni riders, the experience would actually be less pleasant: Muni vehicles might get so packed that riders would start getting passed up at bus stops, and might have to wait even longer to get a seat. For the city, it would be a big hit to revenue, which goes to paying for the service in the first place.

When it comes to parking meters, the exact same logic should apply. If the city doesn't charge for parking spaces, suddenly it becomes almost impossible to find a spot, making the experience worse for drivers and anyone in their path as they circle endlessly for parking. It also deprives the city of money to compensate for the free real estate it's providing to cars and, this being by voter-mandate a Transit First city, to pay for the transit service it strives to provide.

But while the Mayor accepted the results of a study that found that free transit isn't all that viable of an option right now, he's been far more reluctant to accept the results of another study that found that free parking is even more problematic.

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When the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which runs Muni and manages city parking policies, completed the first-ever count of all the publicly available parking spaces in San Francisco, the agency hoped software developers would use the data to create apps to reduce the delays to transit caused by drivers circling the block in search of parking. Through the SFPark pilot, the SFMTA intends to make it easier and clearer for drivers where available parking is located so they spend less time in traffic and less time creating traffic.

One of the first new iPhone apps to take advantage of this data was released this week in the iTunes Store and is called San Francisco Parking by developer by Nick Capizzani, a recent graduate from Purdue University who founded Mobile Parking Apps. The application maps publicly available parking garages and includes hourly rates, monthly and early bird rates where applicable, and general information about meter rates and street sweeping throughout the city.

The app also includes motorcycle meter rates by zone and a feature that queries Craigslist for parking-related ads, from private monthly garage offerings to people hoping to make a buck on game-day parking near AT&T Park. It also has a feature to help users find their cars after parking them and a timer that counts down the time remaining on a meter.

Though it isn't available currently, San Francisco Parking will soon have BART parking garage and lot information through a partnership with Parking Carma, which monitors real-time occupancy data at BART facilities.

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In his magnum opus, The High Cost of Free Parking, UCLA Professor Donald Shoup argues that city parking managers will build merchant support for extending parking meter hours and pricing them according to demand if they return some or all of the extra revenue to the merchant corridors where it was collected.

By using the revenue to keep the sidewalks clean, beautify the streetscape, and generally improve shopping districts, cities like Old Pasadena have been able to win over skeptical business owners.

So what if San Francisco tried the same approach?

As Streetsblog reported last year, some merchants and community groups say they'd be more open to extended meter hours if there were direct improvements to the neighborhood as a result.

Shoup himself weighed in on the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's (SFMTA) exhaustive parking study, praising its scope but pointing out that, from a political perspective, using the revenue to spruce up the street is crucial. "Everybody wants better bus service and more frequent bus service, but that's hard to see, especially if you're a struggling merchant," Shoup told Streetsblog.

"I think that it's easy to see very clean sidewalks, very well-policed sidewalks in front of your restaurant, rapid responses to any cracks in your sidewalks, maybe much more frequent cleaning," he added.

At the time, SFMTA Executive Director Nat Ford called such plans "pretty far down the line in terms of this discussion."

Recently, we asked Ford to give an update on his thinking about the idea.

"The answer is, our financial situation is so dire that I need to get every penny that we have," Ford responded.

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