Parking

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.

You'd hardly know that it's illegal to charge discounted daily and monthly parking rates at numerous downtown San Francisco garages because enforcement of the law is almost non-existent.

The SFMTA Board of Directors voted to continue the agency's declaration of fiscal emergency today, but took a proposal to charge a premium for cable cars and express bus routes off the table, and promised to use some of the $36 million expected from a state windfall to help "defray or delay" a 10 percent service cut scheduled to take effect in a month

No sizable city in the country, or likely the world, has been able to say with any certainty how many parking spaces it has, public or private, until now. Over the last 18 months, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA) has tallied every publicly accessible parking space within city limits, including free and metered spaces on-street and every publicly accessible garage [PDF map].

The evidence keeps mounting that smart parking policy is an essential tool in the fight to curb traffic. A new study of two German neighborhoods indicates that managing the supply of parking can make streets more livable, even in places that already have great infrastructure for transit, walking, and biking. Eliminating mandatory parking minimums, the … Continued

In a move to gain the support of Supervisor Bevan Dufty, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu has stripped language from his proposed garage legislation that would have ensured all new garage additions to existing buildings in Chinatown, North Beach and Telegraph Hill conform with Better Streets Plan (BSP) guidelines.

For a second time in two weeks, the Board of Supervisors today delayed a final vote on legislation that would impose stricter rules on the construction of new garages in Chinatown, North Beach and Telegraph Hill. Unlike the first delay, however, the Board voted to make a small amendment to the measure today, passing the amended bill on first reading. It will be back next week for a final vote.

The Board of Supervisors will vote tomorrow on legislation that would limit new garages in Chinatown, North Beach and Telegraph Hill.

The House has just begun voting on the Senate jobs bill, which includes a $20 billion reprieve for the nation's highway trust fund and an highway expansion of Build America Bonds -- but though the legislation is expected to pass, it won't be headed to the president's desk yet.