Parking

A new app called "MonkeyParking" being tested in San Francisco has made the rounds in local media this week for its bizarre driver-to-driver payment system. Here's how it works: A driver leaves her car in a valuable parking spot and tells other app-using drivers that she is willing to move it for a price of up to $20.

Re-shaping city streets almost always runs up against some level of opposition -- it's part and parcel of physically changing what people often see as their territory. Whether residents get to have safer streets, however, often comes down to the elected leaders who stand up to the naysayers.

Four years after the SFMTA started converting curbside car parking into bike parking with bike corrals, the city now has 55 corrals that can lock 668 bikes -- and still more are on the way.

The vast majority of San Francisco's street space is devoted primarily to moving and storing cars, and most of that curbside parking for private automobiles is given away for free. Most of the city's street infrastructure is not paid for by fees related to driving, so it is disproportionately bankrolled by those who don't drive, through general taxes. By any objective measure, the state of affairs on San Francisco's streets is heavily tilted toward cars and designed to incur minimal personal cost to drivers.

The Warriors announced this week that the site for the basketball team's proposed arena would be moved from Piers 30-32 on the Embarcadero to Mission Bay, quelling opposition from waterfront development foes. Whether or not the new site will work out for better or worse in terms of accessibility to regional transit, however, is still up for debate.

The SFMTA Board of Directors today caved to pressure from Mayor Ed Lee by removing Sunday parking meters, a move folded into its approval of the agency's two-year budget.

Correction: The SFMTA Board meeting begins at 2 p.m., not 1 p.m. as previously stated. Depending on the number of speakers, the meeting could last hours. You can view the meeting live on SFGovTV 2.

Tech workers' humdrum daily commutes in San Francisco have recently become anything but. An environmental appeal was filed (and later rejected) against the city, on the grounds that the "Google buses" are a direct cause of skyrocketing rents and housing displacement. Protestors blockading tech shuttles in bus stops have drawn a frenzy of international media attention.

SFMTA Director Ed Reiskin said today that he thinks the agency should keep Sunday parking meters but back off on actually enforcing them.