Photo: Aaron Bialick

The SFMTA Board of Directors approved several parking policy changes Tuesday, including a pilot program to provide residential parking permits for child care providers. The board also decided to end free parking for SFMTA employees and establish a 2-hour time limit for broken parking meters.

A number of people testified for and against allowing nannies to be eligible for use of their employers’ residential parking permits. The testimony swayed some directors to favor a pilot program with some conditions, including requiring neighborhood approval, tighter restrictions on the children’s ages, and strict penalties for fraudulent applications.

Directors Cheryl Brinkman and Bruce Oka were originally opposed to the idea of expanding subsidized parking accommodation in the face of the city’s Transit First policy. “Every car trip we add negatively impacts every single one of our transit riders,” said Brinkman. “We can’t talk about increasing [Muni] efficiency and saving money without recognizing that the only way to do that is to get our buses out from behind the car traffic that’s out on the streets.”

Several directors spoke of a dilemma they felt between supporting both a Transit First and a family-friendly city. ”I do believe in San Francisco and the Transit First policy, and I think it’s critical we review that policy and understand it,” said recently inaugurated Director Leona Bridges. “However, I also…think the children of San Francisco are important, and I also think we should think about the elderly and the disabled.”

Catherine Stefanie, a mother and aide to Supervisor Mark Farrell, argued in support of the proposal. ”It’s not ‘Transit First’ versus helping working families,” she said. ”I think a lot of working families try ‘Transit First’ and use their cars when necessary. It doesn’t mean [it] won’t be an option for these families.”

Still, the conventional wisdom of transporting children by car is questionable, as is the need for child care providers to drive at all. “I raised my two kids on Muni,” said Bob Planthold of the Senior Action Network. “I wonder why these folks who have the capacity to hire a nanny can’t allow their driveway or garage to be used by the nanny’s car, or they can’t allow the nanny to drive one of the family cars, or why they expect their kids have to be taken around by cars.”

Under the current proposal, each household within a residential parking permit area would be allowed to issue approved caregivers a number of their allotted four permits, very few of which are regularly used, according to SFMTA Sustainable Streets Director Bond Yee.

Aiming to avoid “painting with a broad brush,” Director Jerry Lee proposed a trial of the program on a “block-by-block” basis that would require residents to garner a 51-percent approval from their neighbors in the same way that residential parking permit areas are already established.

The directors came to a consensus on piloting neighborhood-approved programs for nine months while also lowering the children’s age limit from twelve to six and imposing a thorough approval process to be amended into the proposal’s language before implementation. Strict penalties for fraud, such as revoking all permits from a household, will also be discussed in future meetings.

The board also voted to begin charging SFMTA employees for parking at a below-market rate of $80 per month, a price set by adding $10 to the cost of a Muni Fast Pass, according to SFMTA CFO Sonali Bose. Options for hourly, daily, and weekly permits will also be available, and the fine for violations will be $55.

In addition, a 2-hour time limit at all broken meters was approved following concerns that vandalism could increase when SFPark is fully implemented in March.

Residential Parking Permit (RPP) zones. Courtesy: TA

Throughout the study, the TA clearly embraced Shoup's market principles for pricing the curb in accord with demand for space so that parking, particularly in commercial districts and spillover neighborhoods, is best utilized to serve the city's competing interests for the scarce resource.

The study is enormous and at the end of the presentation by the TA, the Board decided to extend its review for one month, as requested by Board President David Chiu. Chiu was concerned that the study didn't properly address issues for "the low-income neighborhoods, Mission, Chinatown, Tenderloin, where low-income folks who have cars don't have access to garages. I think that if you go forward with some of the recommendations here it could create really adverse conditions that I don't think were thoroughly vetted in their study."

"I do think at the end of it we'll probably end up approving the study," he added, though he said he wants to bring the stakeholders he assumes would be effected together to air their grievances.

The study estimated there are more than 600,000 parking spaces in San Francisco, of which 320,000 are on-street and only 24,000 are regulated with parking meters. Residential parking permits (RPPs), as evidenced by the map above, have been added throughout the city in an ad-hoc fashion and in many areas are not synthesized with metered parking.

The study recommends charging more for RPPs and adjusting them to better integrate with metered parking spaces. From the study:

The current RPP program provides benefits to a select group of parkers—those who store their car(s) on-street during weekday mid-days—and does not set an appropriate price level that recognizes the value and scarcity of on-street spaces. The price of a residential permit should be increased, and this action should be carried out in conjunction with restructured regulations that provide permit holders with a tangible benefit (e.g., extending hours of regulation, limiting overall permit supply, etc.).

Given the long time-frame of the study, parking management solutions like SFPark have come online and will test many of the recommendations in real-time, such as replacing individual meters with multi-space meters, improving variable payment options, adding directional signage with real-time parking data, and improving enforcement efficiencies.

One of the more politically interesting recommendations from the study is the Parking Benefit District (PBD), a Shoupian principle that would direct a portion of new revenues generated from increasing parking regulation fees to transportation objectives in the local district, such as improved sidewalks, transit enhancements, bicycle parking, etc.

Supervisor Sean Elsbernd, who initially bristled at the PBD proposal, which could add meters to residential streets around commercial districts to deal with overflow from the commercial destinations, seemed to concede the point if the metering decisions were left to neighborhoods where the districts would be established.

Giving control of parking pricing back to local neighborhoods, however, appears to contradict Proposition A's intent to depoliticize parking by taking control of traffic decisions from the Board of Supervisors and giving it to the MTA.

"The voters have made clear that parking-related revenue goes to the MTA and our transit system," said MTA Spokesperson Judson True, referring to Proposition A. "That makes complete sense because transit has to be an attractive alternative to driving for smarter parking management strategies to work."

Parking Benefit Districts In Detail

From the study: "As discussed throughout this report, pricing is the most efficacious means of managing on-street parking when occupancy routinely exceeds practical capacity. A (PBD) program could be made available to neighborhoods facing parking challenges, regardless of whether the neighborhood is currently covered by an RPP."

A PBD program would incorporate the following components:

• Allow neighborhoods to opt-in. Neighborhoods could elect (through an adopted administrative process) to create a PBD. If the neighborhood is currently covered by a [residential parking permit] RPP, the PBD would replace the RPP (or applicable portion thereof).
  

• Employ price-based regulation and associated elements. Variable pricing is necessary to effectively manage on-street parking in high-demand neighborhoods. New technology would be deployed to allow for variable pricing, user information, and enhanced enforcement. The hours during which parking is priced would be evaluated and modified as necessary. Conventional strategies, such as provision of loading zones, would be reevaluated and adjusted appropriately.
  

• Expand metering to areas with peak parking demands in excess of 85 percent. All blocks with practical capacity issues warrant price-based management. Expansion of metering into areas traditionally designated as “residential” could potentially be paired with an exemption for preferential permit holders (priced at higher than current rates, as discussed above) at all or some times of day.
  

• Provide parking privileges to preferential permit holders at an appropriate price point. Residents of the neighborhood would be permitted to purchase monthly permits for on-street parking on residential streets in the neighborhood. Permits should be priced at a high enough level to appropriately value on-street space and reduce demand for on-street parking (by encouraging off-street parking, reduced vehicle ownership, etc.).
  

• Invest a portion of net new revenues within the neighborhood and involve the community in prioritizing expenditures. This is the central element of PBDs. By pairing the PBD concept with price-based regulation there is even greater opportunity for neighborhoods to reap the benefits of pricing—through improved parking reductions and a reduction in traffic volumes, as well as through funding available to invest in local transportation projects.
  

• Recognize the limits of fully addressing peak demand in residential areas. In many neighborhoods, demand for overnight on-street parking is especially high. Overnight parking demand is likely to be managed to some extent by higher preferential permit fees, but even a price-based PBD program must recognize the limits of using price during very late hours when enforcement is more of a challenge. It is important to note that on-street occupancies in excess of 85 percent may be more tolerable during the late-night periods, when traffic volumes are light, and businesses and other.
  

Flickr photo: andreil

Why is San Francisco -- considered by many around the world to be a “progressive” and “green" city with a Transit First policy -- still debating whether to extend meter hours and parking enforcement, even in the face of a crippling Muni budget deficit? Didn't we merge Muni with the Department of Parking and Traffic precisely so policy decisions about management of the streets would benefit the operations of transit, bicycling, and walking?

Some politicians, including the Mayor, apparently can't stop viewing these issues from behind the wheels of their SUVs. They can't see past the myth that raising parking fees will drive away business, thus perpetuating an erroneous stereotype that most urban shoppers drive. My colleague Matthew Roth wrote a great piece debunking that popular fallacy, noting that the majority of shoppers don't drive to shop in areas like North Beach and that in aggregate, transit riders, cyclists and walkers spend more than drivers. Other cities that have managed street space in accord with Shoupian market-rate pricing and curbside vacancy targets, and have invested additional revenues in pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure improvements, have seen a rise in business, not a drop.

San Francisco could and should do the same, but the MTA -- namely its chief, Nat Ford, and its Board, all appointees who rarely act independently -- has bowed to pressure from the Mayor, and Supervisors Carmen Chu and Bevan Dufty and taken Sunday and evening parking enforcement until 10 p.m. off the table as a much-needed revenue measure to fund Muni. Instead, the MTA is going to study extending it to 8 p.m. Supervisor John Avalos and four of his colleagues on the Board want it penciled back in the budget. Supervisor Sophie Maxwell, who was on the fence, is coming around and might join other members of the Board of Supervisors next week in rejecting the MTA budget if Ford doesn't follow the recommendations of a "Transit Justice Package," and make some changes. As Supervisor David Campos has noted, asking for a $15 million readjustment is not a radical proposal.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, responding to a question from Streetsblog last week, seemed stuck to his windshield perspective. When I asked him what he thinks about the fact that Muni riders are taking a much bigger hit than drivers in this year's budget, he responded: "Look at what we’ve done in the last few years. There have been dramatic increases in parking, fines and fees related to automobile use. So, you have to look at the totality of the last few years and I think assess it in proportion to what’s happened over the years."

Nonsense. How about the last decades? We've bent over backwards to accommodate cars and vehicle ownership while transit service has deteriorated calamitously.

We're supposed to be a Transit First city, but we're not taking advantage of the enormous revenue opportunities that options like metered enforcement represent, and we haven't raised meter rates since 2005. There are an estimated 320,000 on-street parking spaces, of which only 25,000 are metered, and those metered spaces are far from market-rate. If the average parking space is about 200 square feet, that amounts to roughly 60,000,000 square feet of real estate that we're giving away for free or next to nothing so people can store their private property in public. Of the 83,000 residential parking permits (RPP) doled out each year, we practically give them away for $74. How does that make any economic sense?  We need to change the vehicle code that prevents the MTA from raising RPP rates, which are only priced at cost recovery (the amount to administer the program), and we need to charge a fee that approximates private lots and garages.

While SFPark is a great start at better management of the curbside, it will apply to only 6,000 on-street spaces and is not meant primarily as a revenue generator.  The kind of change we need is sea change, a complete transition away from 60 years of externalizing the costs of car ownership.  This kind of political leadership isn't coming from the top and seems fleeting among the majority of supervisors.

Chu and Dufty won't give in on their reticence. Chu, who gets around mostly by car, said in an interview earlier this year that she believes San Francisco has a parking shortage. Dufty was also feeling heat from the Mayor, but said he was also taking into account concerns from some Castro merchants. But really, if Chu wants available parking, she should back stronger market-priced meter enforcement. If Dufty wants more business in the Castro, he should back extended meter enforcement.

From Donald Shoup's book, "The High Cost of Free Parking":

"Market-priced curb parking will reduce traffic congestion, air pollution, and energy consumption caused by cruising and also make curb parking more convenient. Eliminating the need for off-street parking requirements will, in turn, reduce development costs, make the land market more efficient, and improve urban design. Finally, the revenue from curb parking will either improve public services or reduce taxes that distort the economy, or both."

Other cities have already done what the MTA originally proposed last month. Los Angeles, Long Beach, Glendale, Pasadena, Montreal and Princeton, New Jersey are examples of cities that have implemented parking enforcement on Sundays. Pasadena extends its evening meters to 12 a.m. on weekends, and 10 p.m. during the week. But in San Francisco? Most metering ends at 6 p.m.

Source: SFMTA

If the MTA is going to truly be an independent agency, then Nat Ford needs to stand up to Gavin Newsom for once, putting aside his political loyalties. Don't study extending metering hours, just do it! Ford went along with these parking enforcement proposals in the first place. If he doesn't make these changes, we might have to go back to the voters and change the governing structure of the MTA to get the kind of Transit First city we all deserve.

Matthew Roth contributed to this piece.

Photo by dav id from East Bay Indymedia

Over an hour into intense public comment calling for the firing of BART General Manager Dorothy Dugger and Police Chief Gary Gee, Gabriel Meyers, 31, who had been visibly agitated and unstable throughout the meeting, hurling epithets from behind the speakers at the podium, rushed at Dugger and sprayed her with a tube of red paint. 

A quick acting BART police officer, who Board President Tom Blalock later commended and called "a runningback" for how quickly he crossed the room, tackled Meyers and subdued him.  Meyers was charged with two counts of battery, one count of resisting arrest, and one count of disrupting a lawful assembly.

No Justice No BART organizers and a Grant family member present at the meeting condemned the attack and said Meyers was not associated with their efforts to seek justice for the shooting.  Several protesters in the hall were upset by the attack and said they knew it would dominate the news coverage of the event, detracting from their message.

Discussion of BART's Availability and Utilization Study (PDF), which examined racial and gender disparity in BART's contracts for construction and professional services (Disadvantaged Business Enterprise, or DBE goals) was only slightly less eventful. The study found that when BART had DBE goals in place from 2002-2006, they failed to award construction and professional services contracts in accord with the demographic availability of contractors.  Over the past two years, when BART suspended its DBE goals, the results were much worse.

While African Americans make up 8.01 percent of available construction contractors, they were only awarded 0.28 percent of contract dollars; Asian Americans 10.98 percent availability, 0.30 percent awarded, Hispanic Americans 8.08 percent availability, 0.79 percent awarded, Caucasian Females 6.87 percent availability, 3.11 percent awarded, and Caucasian Males 65.71 availability, 95.32 percent awarded.

The study recommended that BART re-instate DBE goals immediately, and among other long term goals: improve district wide communications with DBEs, develop BART Staff DBE program training, implement prime, sub awards, and bidders tracking, and publish enhanced bi-annual DBE utilization reports.

BART Director James Fang criticized the study, which took over two years to complete and cost the agency nearly half a million dollars, for only completing analysis of construction contracts and some service contracts, but failing to address procurement.  Fang said he couldn't endorse the recommendations of the study if it failed to include procurement and to more completely analyze services, despite warnings from staff that any delay on endorsing the study's recommendations for racial and gender screening would mean that projects like the Oakland Airport Connector would go to bid without the higher standard.

A member of the public became so enraged with Director Fang he suggested Fang "should be taken out back and beaten with a rose bush" for being racially divisive (the man was African American, Fang is Asian American).  After a heated back and forth, order was finally restored to the meeting and the Board voted 7-1 to endorse the recommendations of the study.

The Budget

Visibly exhausted Board directors tabled discussion of the budget, but released staff's proposals to the public and set a date for a public hearing on May 28th.  Final adoption of the budget is expected on June 11th.

Staff proposed many options for eliminating the budget deficit, which would be $54 million this year and $249 million over four years without action by the Board, most notably a 10 percent fare increase (up from 6.1 percent already approved) effective July 1st, service cuts across the system, and revising BART's East Bay parking formula to extend a daily parking fee to every station where parking is currently free, except for Hayward, Oakland Coliseum, and North Concord.

This packet of proposals would still leave a deficit of $23 million. Other remedies proposed by staff that will be discussed at the next Board meeting, could include:

• Cut 50-100 additional positions ($5-10M)
  
• Eliminate mid-day Richmond-SF and Fremont-SF service ($2-3M)
  
• Higher fare increase across the system: 15 percent instead of 10 percent ($8M)
  
• Increase minimum fare from $1.50 to $1.75 ($14M)
• Increase Transbay surcharge 10 cents ($5M)
• Increase SFO Premium fare by $2.00 ($7M)
• Parking: increase fees, market based ($0.5 - 3M)
  

Director Tom Radulovich was confident the controversial proposal among suburban directors to expand parking fees to stations that don't currently have them would pass, given the budgetary concerns.  "I think there is finally opportunity for movement," he said. Radulovich suggested that the operator should consider market-rate parking charges could be used to offset the longest-distance trips, which wouldn't suppress reverse commute incentives, and even suggested they revisit the possibility of a monthly pass for riders.

"Right now you can get a monthly pass on parking, not on riding," said Radulovich.  "We should reverse that."

General Manager Dugger said the monthly pass is not beneficial to BART's bottom line as a budget proposal.  "I would not advocate looking at that as part of a budget strategy solution but as a fare-policy consideration, which we have looked at from time to time.  To date we've decided that our distance-based fare is equitable, beneficial, and we would not recommend any changes."

Board President Tom Blalock, who has historically resisted charging for parking, rejected a call for market-based parking, which he said would disproportionately impact riders in stations farther from the BART core. "I think we'll have some nibbling around the edge of the parking charge.  I think there'll be more stations with parking charges," but he said that he knew there were many directors who would resist raising fees at stations that already charge for parking.

When asked why parking fees weren't set to a ratio that would at least cover the cost of maintaining the parking space (over $1/space/day for surface lots, over $2/space/day for garages), Blalock said, "Well that's an interesting cliche, but nobody makes the same parallel in terms of the cost of maintaining the huge grandiose stations that are underground in Oakland and San Francisco.  Suburban riders pay for those.  Nobody wants to hear that.  It's part of the same system that paved the parking lots.  I call it the same infrastructure and everyone ought to pay for it."

Expect some fireworks from the Board side of the rostrum at the next Board meeting, assuming the directors can get to the budget.