Parking

At another marathon Planning Commission meeting last week, parking was all the rage. Two projects in particular had community members and housing and transit advocates fired up because of the parking that developers proposed to build, or in one case, to not build.

When the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) counted all the publicly available parking spaces in San Francisco, city planners argued one of the more significant benefits of such a comprehensive study would be to put to rest speculative arguments about whether or not there was "enough parking" in a given neighborhood. Without a baseline of parking supply, the argument ran, the concern of neighbors or advocates about too much or too little parking wouldn't be based on good data.

Streetsblog tipsters have been sending numerous emails about a public meeting tonight at UCSF's Mt. Zion campus auditorium, concerned that a proposed 6-story building with 7 levels of parking that will add 230 new parking spaces.

Very little is as emotional in city-government policy making as parking and today's San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency hearing on the addition of 1310 new meters was no exception.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) has scheduled an administrative hearing later this month so it can move forward with the installation of 1310 new single-space parking meters that accept credit cards, while extending time limits at those meter locations to four hours. The meters are expected to net the agency approximately $1 million annually, some of which will go to fund Muni.

When parking expert Donald Shoup publicized his principle several years ago that cities should manage the demand for curbside parking by adjusting the cost so that there was always an available space, he probably didn't think a large city like San Francisco would move from theory to practice so quickly, nor that the city's SFPark pilot program would be as sophisticated as it is.

When the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), which runs Muni and manages city parking policies, completed the first-ever count of all the publicly available parking spaces in San Francisco, the agency hoped software developers would use the data to create apps to reduce the delays to transit caused by drivers circling the block in search of parking. Through the SFPark pilot, the SFMTA intends to make it easier and clearer for drivers where available parking is located so they spend less time in traffic and less time creating traffic.

In a major test of the Market and Octavia Area Plan and of the city's parking policy, the Planning Commission unanimously rejected a developer's request last week for far more parking than is allowed, even with a conditional use permit. 

In his magnum opus, The High Cost of Free Parking, UCLA Professor Donald Shoup argues that city parking managers will build merchant support for extending parking meter hours and pricing them according to demand if they return some or all of the extra revenue to the merchant corridors where it was collected.