Streetsblog San Francisco

Left: The original vision for the conversion of a Caltrans parking lot into a dog run, basketball courts, and a playground. Right: The final plan, which will build only the dog run in order to retain most of the parking lot. Images: Department of Public Works

A plan to convert parking lots under the Central Freeway near Duboce and Valencia Streets into a skate park and dog run is moving forward, but it won’t include basketball courts or a children’s playground as originally envisioned by residents.

Because the city will have to lease the land from Caltrans, which owns and collects revenue from the existing parking lots, city officials involved in planning the long-delayed parks projects say budget constraints left them with no choice but to allow the state department of transportation to retain a large section of the parking lot at the expense of park space.

“The City Parking Area is a vital revenue component to making the entire lease structure with Caltrans feasible; thus helping to fund the projects and keep them moving forward,” wrote Gloria Chan, a spokesperson for the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, in a February email to residents. ”Without this revenue, we would not be able to plug the funding gap needed for these projects.”

D6 Supervisor Jane Kim introduced legislation this week to establish agreements between Caltrans and city agencies to move the project forward, and construction on the skate and dog parks are expected to begin this summer. She praised the project planners, but made no comment on the downsizing.

The SF Examiner reported details of the deal last month:

Under the terms of the lease deal, Caltrans will receive $10,000 a month for 20 years, with rent increasing by 2 percent every year. The Recreation and Park Department — the agency in charge of maintaining the park — will pay $85,000 a year for the site. Public Works will pay $66,000 a year.

The site of the future dog park runs along the left side of this parking lot, seen here from Stevenson Street. Photo: Mike Koozmin, SF Examiner

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Should bicycle riders be expected to stop at this sign? Image: Google Maps

Officers with the SF Police Department have recently been spotted wagging their fingers at bicycle riders for neglecting to stop at a stop sign on northbound Harrison Street at 15th Street, where the “stop” line doesn’t run through the bike lane like they normally do at intersections.

Since Harrison and 15th is a three-way “T” intersection, the bike lane doesn’t intersect with any cross traffic, and the stop sign is poorly placed for bike riders whose chief concern should be yielding to pedestrians in the crosswalk on the far end of the intersection. The intersection is not known to see many bicycle crashes.

Adrian Maestas, who bike commutes through the intersection, says he always stops at the sign anyway, but that on March 22, he witnessed police threatening to crack down on bike riders for rolling through. “Two cyclists whizzed by me, and were greeted by an officer who was parked on the side of the street. He told them to stop on the side, and gave them a warning, saying “today you get one chance, after this, 100 percent stop sign enforcement!” Maestas said he hasn’t seen such enforcement at the intersection since then.

Here’s what California Vehicle Code 22450 has to say about stop sign requirements:

The driver of any vehicle approaching a stop sign at the entrance to, or within, an intersection shall stop at a limit line, if marked, otherwise before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersection.

If there is no limit line or crosswalk, the driver shall stop at the entrance to the intersecting roadway.

Jeff Wozniak, a San Francisco attorney who represents bicycle riders in crashes said he thinks “technically, they’re probably right” in that the bike lane is entering “an intersecting roadway.” However, “My opinion would be that it’s a very confusing intersection, the way that it’s painted, in that you’re not crossing a crosswalk, except when you get to the other side of the intersection.”

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Efforts to reduce traffic caused by drivers circling for parking in the northeast Mission took another step forward last week when the SF Municipal Transportation Agency presented its revised proposal for the expansion of parking meters and permit regulations. Opposition seems to have slightly dwindled compared to the first neighborhood meeting in November, though the SFMTA’s presentation was still interrupted by shouts from audience members who seemed to feel that drivers shouldn’t have to pay the going rate for limited street parking.

Drivers hunt for scarce, unregulated parking on Shotwell Street in the northeast Mission. Photo: Aaron Bialick

Under the SFMTA’s new proposal, about half the area’s currently unregulated parking spaces would be metered, with the other half subject to time restrictions for those without residential parking permits, said Jeff Tumlin, an SFMTA consultant with the transportation planning firm Nelson/Nygaard.

SFMTA planners have been tweaking the mosaic-like map of proposed parking regulations for months, using an unprecedented level of data collection and community input to tailor it to a neighborhood with a mix of residential, retail, and PDR (production, distribution, and repair) buildings that can make it hard for planners to determine where meters and permit restrictions are most appropriate.

But with growing parking demand, it’s become increasingly clear that the status quo of free parking is exerting a high cost in transit delays, noise and air pollution, degraded conditions for walking and biking, and wasted time and fuel. According to the SFMTA, finding a parking spot in the area in the morning hours takes, on average, 27 minutes, or 3.3 miles of driving, with search times running as long as 50 minutes. In the afternoon, the average search time drops to just over 2 minutes. At any given time during business hours, one out of every four blocks reportedly has a double-parked vehicle on it.

“As we all know, the neighborhood is changing, and changing rapidly,” said Tumlin. “As a result, the period of laissez-faire management doesn’t work as well as it once did.”

The proposed meters would start with a rate of 50 cents per hour (a full day of metered parking would cost just $4.50), and all meters could be paid by coin, credit card, phone, or an SFMTA debit card, all in advance of enforcement hours. Meanwhile, any resident within the project area would be eligible for a residential parking permit — a departure from normal rules that only allow residents on RPP-designated blocks to acquire them. The price for a parking permit is $104 per year, or 28 cents per day.

While some attendees did offer some nuanced critiques of the proposal, many of the plan’s staunch opponents seemed to simply dismiss the notion that charging for parking makes spots more readily available. When Tumlin said, “The data is really clear that in the neighborhood as a whole, there is a severe parking availability problem,” a woman in the audience shouted in response, “That’s not going to change.”

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The SFMTA's proposed parking management plan for the northeast Mission, which will be presented at a meeting on Thursday, is now posted on the agency's website.

A draft of the SF Municipal Transportation Agency’s hotly-debated plans to install parking meters and expand permit zones in the northeast Mission has been posted online ahead of a community meeting on Thursday, where agency officials will present it to residents.

Following months of data collection, planning, and community meetings, the SFMTA’s map shows where the agency thinks meters and permits would be appropriate to ensure that enough parking spaces remain available to prevent drivers from needlessly circling the block.

According to the documents, all meters would start at a rate of 50 cents per hour and accept multiple forms of payment. Many would have no time limits. Some blocks would have residential parking permit restrictions, and all residents in the project’s area would be eligible to buy a permit. Since the meters won’t be part of the SFPark program, the SFMTA Board of Directors will consider a proposal tomorrow that would lower the current floor for non-SFPark meter rates outside of downtown from $1.00/hour to $0.25/hour.

Mario Tanev, who started the group sfMORE in support of the SFMTA’s efforts to price parking according to demand, wrote in a blog post that “so far it looks like a very balanced proposal.”

The plans do not include the provision proposed by Potrero Hill Boosters Association President Tony Kelly, who wrote in a Chronicle op-ed last week that RPP holders should be able to park at meters in the area for free.

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Underpriced curb parking contributes to the traffic mess on 17th Street near Folsom. Photo: Aaron Bialick

A lot of traffic in the northeast Mission consists of drivers cruising for parking spots. Motorists in the area circle for an average of 27 minutes in search of a free spot, according to the SF Municipal Transportation Agency, which has held community outreach meetings in recent months to develop a plan for new parking meters and permit restrictions to curb excess traffic in the neighborhood.

In response to fervent opposition to metered parking in the eastern neighborhoods, the SFMTA has pushed back its timeline for installing meters, devoting more attention to data collection and community feedback as it develops parking management plans. On March 21, the agency will present a proposal for the northeast Mission, before beginning the same process of community meetings in the Potrero Hill and Dogpatch neighborhoods.

Rather than asking car-owning residents to pay the going rate for on-street parking, Tony Kelly, a runner-up in the most recent District 10 supervisor race and president of the Potrero Hill Boosters Association, says he has a better idea. In an op-ed in the SF Chronicle today, Kelly said the SFMTA should implement meters and residential parking permits — $104 annual bumper stickers that give parking priority to local car owners — but let permit holders park at meters in the area for free.

Kelly claims that the proposal, which hasn’t been used in any other neighborhood, would free up parking for residents by shooing away car commuters. (According to the SFMTA, only 26 percent of cars parked in the neighborhood are registered in the local zip codes.) He calls it “a better solution, one suggested by planners, transit advocates and local businesses, that can prioritize parking for residents and also handle parking congestion the way the MTA wants.”

Kelly asserts that the northeast Mission is being unfairly targeted because other neighborhoods get RPP zones and no meters, and accuses the SFMTA of “turning its back on decades of transit-first policy.” (In fact, the transit-first policy makes no mention of parking permits.)

Do planners really think parking permits that exempt residents from paying for metered parking are such a good idea?

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Elgin Park, old and new. Left: Google Maps. Right: Mark Dreger.

A nice little transformation has taken place on Elgin Park, a one-block residential street next to the Central Freeway touchdown at Market Street and Octavia Boulevard.

Streetsblog reader Mark Dreger sent in the above photo of the makeover, noting that “it looks like SF’s version of a woonerf” — the Dutch term for the pedestrianized streets common in the Netherlands, where cars are allowed, but priority is given to people on foot and children playing.

The project is a piece of the Department of Public Works’ West SoMa Improvements, which set out to create greener, calmer streets in the neighborhood around McCoppin Street, where the Central Freeway spur was reconstructed in the middle of the last decade. While the removal of the freeway north of Market revitalized Hayes Valley, Caltrans insisted on rebuilding the freeway on the south side of Market, despite a city-backed plan to remove it further south.

Elgin Park, which lies west of Valencia between Duboce Avenue and Market (where there’s a bike/ped-only entrance ramp from Market), is one of several alleyways that are being revamped with new pavement and greening, as well as traffic-calming chicanes and raised crosswalks. At the west end of McCoppin (on the opposite side of the freeway), which has been re-paved with planted medians, chicanes, and bike lanes, the McCoppin Hub plaza is set to be constructed by summer, according to the DPW website.

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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Photo: SFMTA Livable Streets/Facebook

It’s officially rideable: The left-turn pocket and traffic signal connecting Market and Valencia Streets is finished as of today, the SFMTA announced on its Livable Streets Facebook page. Finally, the bicycling gates from Market to the Mission have been opened to people who don’t feel comfortable merging across three traffic lanes and a set of streetcar tracks to turn left with car traffic. A simple but incredibly useful upgrade.

The green-backed sharrow (not pictured) in the center of the street seems like a nice touch, but the concrete divider in the bike lane has drawn some skepticism from observers during construction. If you pass by it on your commute today, let us know in the comments how it works for you.