Parking Meters

...and High Speed Rail getting wired up

The sky is falling! San Francisco drivers paying parking meters with credit cards will no longer get their 27-cent credit card transaction fees bankrolled by the SFMTA.

Building new parking garages in downtown Menlo Park will cost tens of millions of dollars while clogging streets with more traffic. But that's what municipal leaders are seriously considering in an attempt to boost business, apparently oblivious to modern parking policies that have paid off for other Peninsula cities.

The SFMTA recently upgraded all of SF's 29,000 parking meters to "smart meters" that are enabled for demand-based price changes throughout the day, a la SFpark. Now, the SFMTA plans to expand its smart pricing program that has curbed car traffic to more existing meters.

An online petition against parking meters in San Francisco has been gathering thousands of signatures ever since it was launched two years ago on MoveOn.org, a website that claims to host petitions that support "progressive" causes. It’s pretty easy to collect signatures from disgruntled drivers who have been stung by parking tickets, and who glance at a petition without being informed about the benefits of demand-based parking pricing. But MoveOn has actually been promoting the petition, helping to get the 4,000-some signatures it has today.

Ed Lee isn't the first San Francisco mayor to go to bat for free parking. But maybe he'll be the first to realize that this is no way to leave a lasting legacy -- the city will never build a monument to his crusade against parking meters.

Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook and a major contributor to San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, has spent $49,000 of his personal fortune to propel a ballot initiative that seeks to enshrine free parking as city policy, according to the SF Chronicle. Parker gave $100,000 to Lee’s mayoral campaign in 2011.

Petitioners for the "Restore Transportation Balance" initiative aimed at enshrining cars-first policies apparently made false claims about the state of Sunday parking metering to collect signatures.

SFpark has released new comprehensive stats collected during its two-year pilot program phase, documenting the numerous benefits that it garnered by pricing parking according to demand. SFpark is being watched closely by cities around the world, since it's the first program to thoroughly test demand-based parking pricing principles first professed by UCLA's Donald Shoup. But the SFMTA hasn't yet adopted one of Shoup's key recommended strategies: Giving some of the revenue to local community benefit districts to help win support for parking meters.