Streetsblog San Francisco

Photo: davidciani/Flickr

The City of Oakland would apparently like to think it’s doing merchants and shoppers a favor by declaring all on-street car parking free every Saturday until New Year’s.

Of course, parking meters were invented to encourage turnover and allow more driving customers to park near businesses. So while the city’s “gift” probably won’t do much for the local economy, it will help ensure that parking won’t be available. The city is basically inviting car owners to drive on down and circle endlessly for spots.

Meanwhile, the city didn’t see fit to bestow free fares to AC Transit riders, so shoppers considering taking the bus will have even less of an incentive to do so while free parking is on the table. Can the city do any more to get Oaklanders into their cars?

“If parking is filling up, it’s self-defeating — it can actually hurt stores,” said Stuart Cohen, executive director of TransForm, which is based in Oakland. ”You want to look out for unintended consequences, because it could backfire.”

This isn’t the first time Oakland has fallen for the hare-brained notion that free parking is good for business. In 2009, the City Council caved on a proposal to extend parking meter hours into the evening after complaints from some vocal merchants, while businesses in other cities that have chosen to expand meter hours reap the benefits.

Update (Sept. 11, 7:53 p.m.): The pro-meter petition now has 197 signatures. ENUF’s anti-meter petition has 199.

It’s pretty easy to find people who want to perpetuate the free parking giveaway on SF streets, despite the traffic and street dysfunction that result. But it turns out that it’s also not that hard to find people who think the status quo needs to change. A new online petition launched last Wednesday has amassed 95 signatures in support of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency’s efforts to expand meters and introduce parking prices that cut traffic and increase turnover for local businesses.

Photo: SFGate's City Insider

Transit advocate Mario Tanev launched the petition last Wednesday in response to a petition opposed to parking reform launched by Mari Eliza of the Eastern Neighborhoods United Front (ENUF) on August 29, one week prior. That petition currently has 165 signatures.

In a draft press release sent to ENUF’s members today, the organization claimed the counter-petition was launched by the SFMTA. Tanev has no affiliation with the agency.

“As residents and taxpayers of San Francisco we believe that the SFMTA’s first and foremost responsibility is to improve Muni, bicycling, and walking and to make them a more desirable means of transportation,” the counter-petition reads. “As part of that, it is SFMTA’s job to decrease congestion and single-occupancy traffic on its streets. It will also benefit drivers by setting market rates on parking, improving turnover, availability, and reducing congestion due to circling for parking.”

The petition, addressed to the mayor, the Board of Supervisors, and the SFMTA, calls on the agency to expedite four actions:

1. Installing new parking meters and extending the hours of enforcement
2. Rolling out SFPark
3. Enforcing Sunday parking meters
4. Increasing meter rates, fees, and fines as appropriate to prevent double parking and sidewalk parking

Tanev also launched a new website called sfmore.org, whose name is a play on ENUF’s website, sfenuf.org.

As Streetsblog has written, merchants and residents often come out against expanding parking meters, even though it’s been shown to benefit merchants by increasing turnover and allowing more customers to access businesses.

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If cities needed any more reason to curb handicap placard abuse, here it is. The authors of a new study out of Los Angeles point out that rampant placard abuse threatens to undermine performance parking programs like SFPark by skewing the data and the price of parking, the Atlantic Cities explains:

Photo: Nicholas Quesada/Flickr

If a city has a pricing program for parking, like Los Angeles or San Francisco, the costs are even greater. Such programs raise the price of parking until a certain level of vacancy (often 15 percent) is present at any given moment. But disabled placards usually allow drivers to park for free for an unlimited amount of time. Many do just that: a 2009 meter survey in Los Angeles found that the 5 percent of cars with disabled placards used 17 percent of all available time. When placard abuse meets priced parking, the results are flawed space counts and artificially high rates for everyone.

The authors of the study, Michael Manville of Cornell and Jonathan Williams of Fehr & Peers Transportation Consultants in Seattle, call for abolishing free parking perks for handicap placard holders because they work against the interests of the most seriously disabled and poorest members of society, who are not travelling by car. Additionally, they write, “the externalities of this clumsy subsidy threaten to undermine a transportation reform that could deliver large benefits to all citizens.”

As we reported recently, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency is in the early stages of developing a campaign to curb placard abuse, which could involve eliminating the free parking perks enshrined in state law.

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The man and woman in this SUV, parked with a disability placard in a disabled parking spot on John F. Kennedy drive in Golden Gate Park last weekend, had no visible signs of disability. Before parking, the couple switched seats to allow the woman to drive. (Note: Here, the woman is seen picking up something that she dropped.) Photo: Aaron Bialick

Aiming to reduce handicap parking placard abuse, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency is in the early stages of an effort to reform state laws that enshrine free parking privileges for placard holders.

Misuse of handicap placards deprives legitimately disabled drivers of reserved parking spaces close to their destinations, cheats the SFMTA out of public revenue, and lets drivers occupy high-demand parking spots all day with no incentive to limit their stay. SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose said the agency confiscates about 2,000 parking placards for misuse every year, and the fine for the violation was raised this year to $935, following a state bill passed in 2009 that increased the fine ceiling from $100 to $1,000.

Though few details are available on what the SFMTA’s campaign would look like, Rose said any reforms would require state legislation, and that “all options are on the table.” SFMTA staff is currently “working with our regional and state partners to address placard reform to not only make parking easier and more efficient for all, but to improve access to drivers with disabilities,” he said. The agency plans to form an advisory council on the issue this fall.

Aside from the number of placards confiscated annually, the extent of placard abuse in San Francisco isn’t known. But as the Sacramento Bee reported last week, it’s a growing problem in cities throughout California:

As placard numbers grow across the state, frustrated officials from Sacramento to Los Angeles say too many users are in fact able-bodied people abusing the system. It’s time to put a stop to it, they say.

The number of placards in Sacramento has risen far faster in recent years than population growth. As of last year, 100,000 vehicles in Sacramento County had placards. That’s nearly one of every 10 vehicles, the third highest among California counties.

Under state law, the Department of Motor Vehicles issues placards to drivers who submit applications signed by any of a number of health care workers: doctors, chiropractors, optometrists, physician’s assistants, nurse practitioners and nurse midwives.

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On Shotwell Street near 17th Street, three drivers apparently cruising for parking stopped at the sign of an opening parking spot (left). (The driver of the red car, seen through the silver car's windows, won.) This is one area where parking meters would be installed under an SFMTA plan to free up parking spaces. Photos: Aaron Bialick

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency’s embattled efforts to put a rational price on the city’s car parking supply by expanding parking meters have led the agency to develop a document [PDF] that, for the first time, lays out its parking policies in one place. SFMTA officials, who presented a draft to the SFMTA Board’s Policy and Governance Committee today, say the document is intended to clarify the agency’s goals and make its parking management decisions more transparent.

As Streetsblog has written, when parking is free or underpriced, spaces fill up, and drivers cruise around for a spot. That means more pollution, traffic congestion, gas consumption, wear on the roads, slower transit, more danger for people walking and biking, and fewer driving customers able to park near businesses.

The SFMTA’s plans to install parking meters in the Dogpatch, Potrero Hill, and northeast Mission neighborhoods ran into heavy opposition in January from the Eastern Neighborhoods United Front (ENUF), which was formed in opposition to the parking plan. Among the group’s wide-ranging complaints, it says the SFMTA performed poor outreach, and that some of the proposed locations for meters aren’t appropriate. The SFMTA delayed its metering plans to do more analysis and outreach and plans to hold community meetings later this year.

But whether ENUF’s members just don’t want to pay for parking (which they deny), or the group’s complaints are legitimate, one thing is clear: many members say they distrust the SFMTA when the agency says its goal is to properly manage its parking supply. Rather, it seems to many car-owning members, the SFMTA is simply after their money (even if the cost of free parking is externalized to the general public, and the meter expansion plans are supported by advocates like Livable City who don’t receive revenue from them). Mari Eliza, an organizer with ENUF, told the SF Chronicle this week that “people are really ready to fight back” against parking meter expansions. “The city is just going too far,” she said.

“Meters are appearing all over San Francisco,” ENUF’s website says. “Next, the meters will be on your street in front of your home.”

In response to the insistent opposition to SFPark, the SFMTA’s promising pilot program to test out demand-responsive meters which accept credit cards (and can even have lower rates than conventional meters), the agency removed SFPark from the meter expansion in those neighborhoods. By adjusting prices according to demand, SFPark’s goal is to generally keep one space open on every block. Instead, the SFMTA is developing a plan which will only include conventional parking meters.

While the new document doesn’t actually change any policies or practices, SFPark manager Jay Primus called it “a really positive step forward.”

“This mundane document, like the parking census, is actually very exciting,” said Primus. ”This helps the MTA communicate how, where, and why it uses different parking management strategies, it increases the transparency of its parking management decisions, and it explains how those decisions are consistent with the MTA’s goals.”

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Smarter parking policies could lead to less congestion on streets such as University Avenue. The current volume of autos on University is 20,000 per day, according to the city. Photo: Richard Masoner/Cyclicious

For the first time in 15 years, Palo Alto’s outdated parking policies are being reviewed, and planners will consider recommending sustainable parking principles in the downtown core to better manage the supply. The affluent Silicon Valley city has not had a comprehensive examination of its parking strategies since 1997, when it installed four color-coded parking zones downtown. There is a two-hour limit in each zone but all curb parking is free.

“I think everything’s on the table right now. We don’t want to exclude anything at this particular state,” Jaime Rodriguez, the city’s chief transportation official, told Streetsblog.

The study will explore charging for on-street parking, installing SFPark-like meters and sensors and a number of transportation demand management (TDM) measures to discourage single-occupant vehicle trips. Advocates pushing for parking reform hope that Palo Alto will follow cities such as Redwood City or Boulder, Colorado, which have implemented innovative performance-based parking policies and benefit districts that helped spruce up their downtowns and boost business. Two other Peninsula cities — San Mateo and Burlingame — also charge for on-street parking in their downtown business districts.

Palo Alto Mayor Yiaway Yeh led the charge for a comprehensive parking study at the July 16 City Council meeting. A proposed residential parking permit program for the Professorville neighborhood was nixed in favor of the review. Some residents in Professorville and Downtown North have complained that downtown employees who take advantage of unpriced on-street parking on residential streets make it difficult for them to park near their homes.

Some influential merchants and residents are framing the problem as a downtown parking shortage. ”There has always been a parking deficit in the downtown,” Barbara Gross, board member of the Palo Alto Downtown Business and Professional Association, told the City Council. “Parking has a direct influence on the success of the business district and has overflow impacts on surrounding residential areas.”

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Parking meters in San Francisco will be enforced on Sundays starting January 6, 2013, confirms SF Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Paul Rose.

Photo: Rubin 110/Flickr

The meters will be in effect from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. As the SF Chronicle reported today, the SFMTA will also pilot an extension of meter hours in the evening around the Giants ballpark until 10 p.m. starting next spring after SFPark meters are installed in Mission Bay.

Enforcing parking meters on Sundays is expected to reduce the number of drivers circling for parking by increasing turnover during periods of high demand. Parking meter hours in San Francisco basically haven’t changed since 1947, when most businesses weren’t open on Sundays or after 6 p.m., and demand was low.

Today, a car owner can occupy a commercial parking spot for free from Saturday at 6 p.m. until Monday morning, forcing driving customers to cruise around for another available space. Ending the once-a-week parking giveaway is expected to increase turnover for businesses and reduce the congestion, pollution, and noise commonly seen in business districts each Sunday.

Coincidentally, yesterday was the 77th anniversary of the day the country’s first parking meter was installed in Oklahoma City.

The official go-ahead for metered parking on Sundays still requires approval of the citywide fiscal year 2012-2013 budget from the Board of Supervisors, which is expected next Tuesday. The SFMTA budget was approved by the Budget and Finance Committee in May, and initial board approval of the citywide budget is scheduled for today.

A truck parked in a crosswalk at 10th Ave. and Irving Street. (Really?) Photo: Aaron Bialick

As you may have heard, there’s a proposal on the table to increase parking enforcement and fines as the SFMTA grapples with a $14 million budget hole. Like clockwork, the San Francisco Chronicle’s came out with another windshield-perspective editorial bemoaning the city’s determination to uphold parking laws.

As Streetsblog readers occasionally note, the SFMTA’s budgeting process often leads the press to characterize parking enforcement as a revenue raiser, not good urban policy. And today’s piece in the Chron is a good case in point: The paper glosses over the fact that enforcing parking laws maintains safe movement on our streets, instead deploying a batch of arbitrary numbers to plead, in essence, “Come on, can’t illegal parkers keep getting a break?”

[San Francisco's Transit-First Policy] comes with a price, no secret to anyone who’s walked back to a vehicle after running an errand that took a little too long. Tickets slapped on windshields cost more than ever – and the citations are going up.

To meet a projected $19.8 million shortfall over the next two years in the city’s transportation budget, the governing agency wants another $6.5 million in ticket revenue. The city collected $86.3 million in fines in 2011.

Higher traffic tickets are sold as a way to ease traffic, keep Muni moving on crowded streets and create more curbside slots as wary drivers flee a flotilla of ticket-writing officers in scooters. But it’s clearly something else: a traffic-enforcement tool that’s being diverted to pay for the city’s costly transit system.

Really? Let’s start with the basic fact that illegal parking has very real negative impacts. Double parking slows Muni and endangers bicycle riders. Parking on the sidewalk and in crosswalks endangers pedestrians (particularly the elderly, disabled, and families with strollers) and degrades the walking environment. The lack of turnover at metered parking hurts businesses and forces more drivers to cruise for a spot, increasing air pollution, congestion, wear on our poorly-maintained roads, and — full-circle — double parking.

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Since Scott Wiener took office as District 8 supervisor, he’s stood out as a progressive transportation advocate at City Hall, holding the SFMTA accountable for improving service for Muni riders, making the streets safer for pedestrians, and more.

Supervisor Wiener's opposition to Sunday parking metering doesn't jibe with his stance as a transit advocate. Photo: Dennis Hearne Photography

So it was disappointing to hear him say he’s against the SFMTA’s long-overdue proposal to enforce parking meters on Sunday.

At a Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee meeting last Thursday, Wiener told SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin that although he “completely understands the policy rationale for it in theory,” he’s “not a fan of the Sunday meters.”

“Even though the patterns have changed in the last 50 years in terms of activity on Sunday, I also know that patterns have developed taking into account that there are no meters on Sunday,” said Wiener. “I think that’s the reason we’ve seen the reaction that we’ve seen.”

Sunday metering, he added, “is something that has a lot of impacts on a lot of people throughout the city.”

That’s for sure. Every Sunday and every evening after 6 p.m., when metered spots fill up with motorists taking advantage of free parking, scores of drivers opt to cruise or park illegally. That means more drivers distractedly searching for spots, more double-parked cars delaying Muni and endangering bicycle riders, more unnecessary air pollution and wear-and-tear on the city’s already-broken pavement, and businesses hurt by a lack of parking turnover.

If Wiener wants to see the “theory” in practice, he can visit Los Angeles, Old Pasadena, Miami Beach, or Portland, where meters are already in effect on Sundays.

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Photo: Myleen Hollero / Orange Photography

The SFMTA Board of Directors yesterday approved a two-year budget that calls for parking meter enforcement on Sundays and free Muni passes for low-income youth. The budget must still be approved by the Board of Supervisors before it goes into effect on July 1.

As Streetsblog reported yesterday, the SFMTA Board approved a free youth pass program for low-income students but didn’t extend it to all students. With agency staff saying that free Muni for everyone under 17 would trigger maintenance cuts, board members didn’t think that expanding the free rides for student was worth the trade-off. However, advocates from POWER, the organization leading the free Muni for youth campaign, argued that the board was presented with a false choice.

“Making bus maintenance a trade-off with free Muni for all youth is a false, random and last-minute attempt to limit the board’s choice to free Muni for low-income youth,” said a statement released by POWER the day before the meeting. The organization contended that the SFMTA overlooked opportunities to use available regional funds dedicated to programs for low-income riders and improving air quality. Free Muni for all youth, they argued, would get more middle- and upper-income students to take Muni instead of being driven by their parents.

SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin “respectfully disagreed” with POWER’s assertion, arguing that finding additional funds for an all-youth program would come with “real trade-offs.” The $6.6 million in proposed cuts would have come from $3.8 million in maintenance, $2.1 million in state funds for “transit projects in low-income neighborhoods,” and $700,000 to help fund Department of Public Works projects that would include bike and pedestrian improvements. Those funds were “the lowest priority” available, he said.

The $9.6 million for the low-income-only program, which is projected to be open to half of San Francisco students (based on SFUSD’s free and reduced lunch program), will not come out of maintenance funds, said Reiskin, but mostly from $5 million in outside grants that the SFMTA would not have otherwise received. The remaining $4.3 million will come from “general operating funds,” according to an SFMTA document [PDF].

The board passed an amendment to assure advocates of its commitment to seek funding for an all-youth program in the next budget cycle. Upon approval of the low-income program, advocates expressed neither cheers nor jeers.

As for Sunday parking meters, all of the roughly two dozen opponents repeated claims that having to feed meters during church services would repel people from worship. Pastor Amos Brown of Third Baptist Church, who is no stranger to using incendiary rhetoric on the matter, said charging for parking on Sundays was sexist since, he claimed, most churchgoers are women.

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