Parking

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

The SFMTA and the Planning Department presented detailed plans for Polk Street at the project's final open house meeting yesterday. The new aspects include specific locations of bulb-outs, dedicated bicycle signals, left turn prohibitions, loading zones, and new trees and landscaping. Plans to improve bicycle infrastructure are still composed of a mix of protected, buffered, conventional, and part-time bike lanes, depending on the stretch and side of the street.

Tonight is the SFMTA and Planning Department's final open house on the Polk Street redesign, the last chance to weigh in on the agency's preferred design before it goes to the SFMTA Board of Directors for approval. As you can see from the above flyer, the parking-obsessed "Save Polk Street" group is still fighting against safety measures in order to hang on to the small amount of car storage the SFMTA proposes to remove.

Contrary to Mayor Ed Lee's assertions that the public has revolted against Sunday parking meters, records indicate that hardly anyone has complained to City Hall about the policy via email or 311 calls.

“Parking is the single biggest land use in any city,” said UCLA Professor Donald Shoup to a packed house in Berkeley last night, “and it's almost completely unmanaged.” At the same time, “zoning requires a space for every car but ignores the homeless. In our cities, free parking is more important than affordable housing.”

Supervisor John Avalos posted the above photo on Facebook with the following explanation:

The San Francsco Board of Appeals voted yesterday to reverse its decision to downsize the long-embattled condo project at 1050 Valencia Street in the Mission. The project includes no car parking and one bike parking space for each unit.

What if San Francisco stopped adding car parking? The idea might sound a little odd to the average person, but when you look at where the city is heading, the really crazy scenario would be to keep on cramming more cars into our neighborhoods. Under current policies, SF is poised to build 92,000 spots for personal car storage by 2040, consuming an ungodly amount of space in our compact, 7-mile-by-7-mile city. At what point does it stop?

Updated 6:09 p.m. with comment from MPNA.