Streetsblog San Francisco

Following fierce opposition that led the SF Municipal Transportation Agency to roll back its first attempt to expand car parking meters in the northeast Mission, the agency re-started a community process last night to develop a plan for managing parking demand in the area. The meeting was seen as a litmus test for the public’s openness — and the agency’s tact — which will be key to implementing parking meters and permit restrictions to reduce cruising for parking in a dense, complex neighborhood where parking problems are only expected to get worse.

Shotwell near 18th Street. Photo: Aaron Bialick

The area is centered around a 220-space parking lot at 17th and Folsom Streets that’s set to be closed within months and converted into a new park and affordable housing development. As it is, the SFMTA said the area is basically a vacuum of free, unregulated parking surrounded by streets with meters and permit restrictions, making it a magnet for car commuters and long-term car storage that fills parking spots to the brim during the day. A presentation explaining the data and the rationale for using parking pricing to manage demand was made by Jeffrey Tumlin, a principal at Nelson/Nygaard, a consultant firm working on the project with the SFMTA.

“Everyone knows that you can park free all day, all week — you can leave your car here and go to the airport,” Tumlin told the audience, noting that drivers in the area reportedly circle for parking for a half hour, on average. “People are coming from all over to park in your neighborhood.”

Unlike the original planning process, SFMTA officials didn’t present any proposed parking plan at the first meeting — its stated goal was simply to present the block-by-block parking data collected in recent months and field input from residents to help inform a future proposal.

This flyer was distributed at the meeting by an ENUF spokesperson.

Tumlin explained that planners aim to account for the mix of land uses in the neighborhood, including residences, retail shops, and “production, distribution, and repair” businesses — many of which, unlike retail merchants, prefer free vehicle storage over the elevated parking turnover that meters bring. “It is the most complicated mosaic of land uses that I’ve seen, really, in any place I’ve worked anywhere in the world,” he said.

That the SFMTA didn’t adequately account for that complexity was one of the major sources of complaints against the original parking meter plan, which had been presented to residents as part of a larger plan to expand the SFPark smart meter program to manage parking in and around Mission Bay, where major developments are expected to bring an influx of car commuters into the area. The SFMTA took SFPark meters out of the equation, opting for conventional meters instead, to address skepticism voiced by opponents about the efficacy of SFPark. The agency also plans to eventually re-start the planning process in the Dogpatch and Potrero Hill neighborhoods, which were also included in the original plan, “one neighborhood at a time,” said agency spokesperson Paul Rose.

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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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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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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.

Photo: SFBC

In a “bittersweet farewell,” the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition announced today that its policy director, Andy Thornley, has been picked for an internship at the SFMTA’s SFPark program. His transition to city government is a positive sign for the livable streets movement in San Francisco.

Thornley sent an email to colleagues today announcing that he’ll be leaving SFBC at the end of the month. “After seven remarkable and profoundly rewarding years,” he wrote, “I’ll be moving on to a new adventure. I’m taking a position on the SFMTA’s outstanding SFPark team, working with that innovative, effective, award-winning program on the business of rationalizing the way San Francisco manages parking, for the benefit of everyone.”

Thornley is known as an amiable alliance-builder and a knowledgeable, insightful guru on the bureaucracy and politics of transportation issues. While at SFBC, he also served as president of TransForm‘s Board of Directors (and still sits on it). I’ve had the pleasure of learning from him since I held an internship at the SFBC in 2009, and I’ve always found the perspective he provides to be invaluable. (We even once rode together in a mega Bike Party-esque bicycle parade through Copenhagen.) Thornley assured his colleagues that he’ll “certainly still be an active, involved member of the SFBC.”

This also won’t be the first time SFPark has picked up some advocate talent: Former Streetsblog reporter Michael Rhodes recently held an internship at the program.

We’ll be eagerly anticipating great things from Andy in his new role.

Andy after arriving at City Hall from a tandem bike ride with Supervisor Carmen Chu on Bike to Work Day last month. Photo: SFBC/Flickr

The SFMTA announced yesterday that it would no longer include areas of the Dogpatch, Potrero Hill, and Mission neighborhoods in its pilot expansion of SFPark after pushback from a vocal group of opponents.

This misleadingly labeled website, sfpark.info, is chock-full of some pretty outlandish claims about SFPark. Should San Francisco bend to this kind of hysteria?

However, SFMTA spokesperson Paul Rose said the agency is still proposing to install conventional parking meters, which lack the technology that allows the agency to measure demand and adjust prices accordingly. At upcoming community meetings, SFMTA staff will also discuss residential parking permits (RPP), which give residents priority for street parking in those neighborhoods, Rose said.

An SFPark statement reads:

Many neighbors in the 12th & Folsom, 17th & Folsom, Dogpatch, and Potrero Hill areas have expressed uneasiness about being part of the SFpark pilot project until further evaluation of its success. Based on this feedback, the SFMTA will no longer propose for these areas to be included as SFpark pilot areas. As the SFMTA revises parking management proposals for each of these areas, they will reflect regular its [sic] policies and practices.

Are the opponents any less ”uneasy” about conventional meters than SFPark meters? Members of the Eastern Neighborhoods United Front (ENUF — get it?), the leading group mobilizing against paying for parking, make a plethora of outrageous claims about SFPark’s motives on their misleadingly labeled website, SFPark.info (though ENUF asserts that it is not officially associated with the website). The group’s opinion of conventional parking meters doesn’t seem any more favorable: according to Mission Local, ENUF organizer John Lum is “not ready to claim victory” since parking meters are still on the table.

But if ENUF is unwilling to accept anything besides the status quo of dysfunctional free parking, then if they ever do claim victory, who else will win? Not the drivers who’ll be circling for parking. Not the residents who’ll be burdened with more traffic in their neighborhood. No one, really, except the vocal contingent who believes free street parking is a “right.”

Photo: SFMTA_sfpark/Flickr

Speaking of extending parking meter hours…

In the New York Times today, Michael Cooper and Jo Craven McGinty examine how SFPark’s parking price adjustments have affected San Francisco streets so far:

It is too early to tell whether the program is working over all, but an analysis of city parking data by The New York Times found signs that the new rates are having the desired effect in some areas. While only a third of the blocks in the program have hit their targeted occupancy rates in any given month since the program began, the analysis found, three-quarters of the blocks either hit their targets or moved closer to the goal. The program is a bit more successful on weekdays.

Cities around the country continue to set their sights on SFPark, eager to see what conclusions come out of the groundbreaking parking management program.

Assuming the early indications hold up and Donald Shoup’s theory is borne out in practice, cities plagued by cruising traffic will find SFPark’s data incredibly valuable in emulating San Francisco’s success. Unfortunately, the nation’s leader in parking innovation has a dirty little secret: it still doesn’t allow SFPark to operate on Sundays or evenings, and until it does, there will be a major gap in the data.

Giving away free curbside car parking when it’s in demand on Sundays and evenings just doesn’t make any sense.

How long will City Hall keep drivers circling for parking on Sundays? Photo: jeweledlion/Flickr

The point may feel somewhat belabored to Streetsblog readers, but it’s highly relevant at the moment and hugely important for the city’s streets and transit system. Political momentum to end the traffic congestion and dysfunction caused by unregulated parking on Sundays and evenings finally seems strong as the measure comes up for approval next month in the SFMTA’s two-year budget.

Although rationalizing curbside parking throughout the week still faces opposition from some church leaders and other members of the public, key SFMTA decision-makers and stakeholders seem to be on board, for the most part.

But it was only two years ago that then-Mayor Gavin Newsom pressured the SFMTA Board of Directors into ditching the idea. And Mayor Ed Lee has indicated that he might do the same.

While the political climate among city supervisors is unclear, the policy has mostly met with support this time around from SFMTA Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin, the SFMTA Board of Directors, an advisory panel of community stakeholders, and the members of the public who have attended the three town hall meetings on the SFMTA budget so far.

Reiskin told Streetsblog that although he doubts “the general public at large would necessarily be supportive” of the policy just yet, support from those groups “will weigh heavily” on whether it goes through.

“The MTA was set up to be somewhat independent and autonomous from City Hall… but I think I have a responsibility to make the people who were elected by the people of San Francisco comfortable with [the budget] I’m presenting,” said Reiskin. “It doesn’t mean they’re going to like it.”

In a study released in 2009 at the request of city supervisors, SFMTA staff recommended enforcing parking meters on Sundays and weeknights past 6 p.m. (in some districts). Sunday and evening metering is already policy on Port property (including Fisherman’s Wharf) and in many other American cities, including Los Angeles, Miami Beach, and Portland, OR. In some cities including Chicago, Old Pasadena, and Tampa, FL, meters are in effect until 2 a.m. or later.

“There’s not much justification for us not to manage parking on Sundays when businesses are open,” said Reiskin.

Recently, the vocal opposition to metering on Sundays has mostly come from churches whose driving members have long benefited from an unwritten exemption from parking enforcement on Sundays, allowing them to co-opt traffic lanes and bike lanes as free parking lots.

Much of the rhetoric defending that practice seems to equate the entitlement to free and illegal car parking with the ability to worship. In the SF Examiner today, Pastor Amos Brown of Third Baptist Church called Sunday metering a “hostile, negative measure against faith communities in the city,” which suggests “that people of faith are not welcome here.” (Note: Third Baptist has no metered parking, and on Sundays drivers typically double park on the surrounding streets like McAllister, a Muni and bicycle route.)

By this logic, people of Jewish faith, who worship on Saturday, already aren’t welcome in San Francisco. Neither, for that matter, are all churchgoers who pay the same price to ride the bus on Sundays that they do the rest of the week. As transit advocate Fran Taylor pointed out, religious leaders haven’t stepped up in the same way for their transit-riding members. “Where were all the pastors when Muni cut service and raised fares, suggesting that people of faith (and everyone else on the bus) aren’t welcome to go to work, school, doctor, church, [and the] grocery store…?” Taylor wrote in response to the Examiner story.

More to the point: Metered parking on Sunday is going to make life easier for church-goers who drive, for the same reason it makes life easier for shoppers who drive — by encouraging the turnover of a limited supply of parking. Metered parking will open up more convenient, legal parking spots for visitors without slowing down Muni or endangering people on bikes. Proponents have also pointed out that fears of having to leave a service to feed the meter could be addressed by extending (or elminating) time limits and providing easier methods of payment, which the SFPark program is doing.

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Mayor Ed Lee stood behind the merits of the SFMTA’s SFPark program at a Board of Supervisors meeting today when questioned about the recent backlash against parking meter expansions in the Dogpatch and Potrero Hill neighborhoods. Those proposals have been put on hold while the SFMTA conducts more outreach to neighbors and merchants.

Mayor Lee speaking at an SFPark press conference. Photo: Mayor's Press Office/Flickr

During the mayor’s regular question-and-answer session with the board, D10 Supervisor Malia Cohen asked the mayor “how this program can be adapted and improved in order to better fit these areas.”

In his prepared response, Lee defended the program, noting that “the world is watching our efforts in parking management.”

“I know firsthand that the Obama administration and the Department of Transportation are paying close attention to SFPark,” he said.

While the Dogpatch, Potrero, and North Mission neighborhoods include businesses that are “more industrial and have few clients and customers visiting during the day,” said Lee, he pointed out that “they are interspersed with businesses that have more daytime activity and need open parking spaces so it’s easy for customers to find a place to park.”

“To really thrive and generate job growth, we need businesses in those areas that need great access. It needs to be easy for people to get there, as well as for goods to be delivered,” he said. ”Areas that don’t have access cannot thrive. Good transit is part of that equation, whether BART, Muni, or the city’s investment in Third Street light-rail line. This transit carries a lot of people in those areas. But for those who have to drive to make pickups and deliveries, it can be hard to find a space during the day. SFPark aims to make it easier to find a spot close to a destination.”

Cohen also asked whether the mayor would “be supportive of evaluating the use of parking passes for employees,” to which he responded: “I will direct the Office of Economic Development to work with employers, particularly PDR [production, distribution and repair] businesses, regarding ways to alleviate financial burden on low-income employees. I know that the SFMTA is already working with the community to develop a sound proposal, and any parking management strategy like SFPark should have ample community buy-in before it’s rolled out.”