Streetsblog San Francisco

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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The SFMTA Board of Directors voted to continue the agency's declaration of fiscal emergency today, but took a proposal to charge a premium for cable cars and express bus routes off the table, and promised to use some of the $36 million expected from a state windfall to help "defray or delay" a 10 percent service cut scheduled to take effect in a month

SFMTA Chair Tom Nolan said he wanted to make the scheduled service cuts "less burdensome on riders" by using some of the state money, and directed staff to come back with "a series of proposals to do that." Specifically, $17 million would be used in this fiscal year, and $19 million carried over to 2011-12. A much smaller portion would be used to lessen service cuts.

"Seventeen million dollars will cover $12 million in existing deficit that we have for the current year, and then there'll be approximately $5 million after that we could use to put some service back on the street, at least until July 1st, in terms of the service cuts, and/or rollback or delay the service cuts until July 1st," SFMTA Chief Nat Ford said in an interview.

Director Cameron Beach called the state money "alleged," because the SFMTA has not gotten a check yet. Indeed, the timing of the funds remained unclear. The SFMTA is struggling to fill a $55 million budget gap in the next fiscal year and a $45 million hole the year after.

Ford said he was hopeful about some impending stimulus funds for capital projects that could be diverted into operations. "We're trying to buy time and let some of these things mature before we cut the service, frankly." He said while the next budget cycle promises to be full of "difficult choices," he sees things improving in 2012.

"We've got one more year of stiff belt tightening. However, in year two [2012], we have a very manageable deficit and light at the end of the tunnel."

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No sizable city in the country, or likely the world, has been able to say with any certainty how many parking spaces it has, public or private, until now. Over the last 18 months, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA) has tallied every publicly accessible parking space within city limits, including free and metered spaces on-street and every publicly accessible garage [PDF map].

The total number of spaces, as Mayor Gavin Newsom recently announced on his Youtube site, is 441,541. Of the total, over 280,000 are on-street spaces, 25,000 of which are metered. For just the on-street spaces, that is roughly the equivalent area of Golden Gate Park.

"Most cities have very little knowledge of their parking inventory," said Rachel Weinberger, a planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former transportation policy adviser to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Weinberger called the parking census a "tremendous effort."

"Without the basic knowledge [city planners] have no basis on which to make decisions about future supply policy, about current management policy or even about how their transportation systems are working."

Don Shoup, planning professor at UCLA and author of the definitive book on the history of parking, The High Cost of Free Parking, was excited to hear the news. "San Francisco’s census of parking spaces is a great achievement, and the first of its kind anywhere," he said.

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