Parking Meters

Updated 4:47 p.m.

Happy New Year, indeed. This Sunday will mark the day when San Francisco finally catches up with the times and runs parking meters during business hours on Sundays, ending the nonsensical weekly tradition of allowing prime parking spots in front of shops to sit occupied for free while drivers circle endlessly around the block.

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.

The City of Oakland would apparently like to think it's doing merchants and shoppers a favor by declaring all on-street car parking free every Saturday until New Year's.

Update (Sept. 11, 7:53 p.m.): The pro-meter petition now has 197 signatures. ENUF's anti-meter petition has 199.

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:

Aiming to reduce handicap parking placard abuse, the SF Municipal Transportation Agency is in the early stages of an effort to reform state laws that enshrine free parking privileges for placard holders.

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.

For the first time in 15 years, Palo Alto's outdated parking policies are being reviewed, and planners will consider recommending sustainable parking principles in the downtown core to better manage the supply. The affluent Silicon Valley city has not had a comprehensive examination of its parking strategies since 1997, when it installed four color-coded parking zones downtown. There is a two-hour limit in each zone but all curb parking is free.