Streetsblog San Francisco

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, in their role as commissioners of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (TA), voted unanimously to approve the TA's enormous on-street parking management study and authorized revisions to pilot Market Street pedestrian and bicycle safety zones.

The TA's on-street parking study had been delayed for two months at Board President David Chiu's request. Supervisors, he said, needed more time to digest its contents, including proposals to extend meter hours and enforcement, expand metered areas to possibly include residential streets bordering commercial districts, to increase the cost of residential parking permits above the current price of administering the program, and to introduce Shoupian parking benefit districts (PBDs).

PBDs would pose interesting governance issues and could strain the relationship between the MTA, the Board of Supervisors and the TA. PBDs, as Chiu and the supervisors envisioned them, would give communities a great deal of leverage in determining how parking would be priced, something that contradicts Proposition A's objective to depoliticize parking by taking specific traffic decisions away from the Board of Supervisors and giving it to the MTA. The MTA theoretically makes parking decisions based on what's best for the overall public, rather than getting bogged down in internecine squabbles over the supply and availability of free parking.

According to Chiu: "The thrust of this study was really to emphasize that there be neighborhood-specific processes set up before there would be parking changes were implemented. If there are increases the study is recommending that additional revenues somehow be farmed back into the neighborhood where those revenues were raised."

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Work crews from the Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) at the MTA have been re-striping portions of Mission Street recently, the old lane markings having all but disappeared as the street crumbles with age.

When I snapped the photo above, the air along the corridor redolent of oil and the machines that churn out our roads (there was also a waft of concrete production from a new building nearby), I was intrigued by the powder thrown on the wet thermoplast by the man in the rear of the frame. 

Assuming it was a drying agent, I was surprised to learn from MTA spokesperson Judson True that the "powder" is actually small glass balls that adhere to the thermoplast and give it a reflective quality when headlights hit it at night.

A number of other questions came up, such as what will become of the runoff from the glass beads that don't adhere to the street paint or the other chemicals sprayed immediately after the beads? Or when are we going to see those same crews striping all those new lanes not for cars? 

Or when are they going to repave Mission Street altogether? I don't see it in DPW's five year repaving plan, but with sections like the photo below the jump, I'd imagine Mission will more resemble a dirt track five years from now than a city street. And given the ailing budget and the death of the street paving bond, is this lane marking operation just lipstick on a pig?

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