Parking

Petitioners for the "Restore Transportation Balance" initiative aimed at enshrining cars-first policies apparently made false claims about the state of Sunday parking metering to collect signatures.

The candidates running for District 10 supervisor this November gave some telling responses to transportation questions last week. The first debate of the D10 race was held at the Potrero Hill Democratic Club and moderated by SF Chronicle reporter Marisa Lagos, who asked some pointed questions on issues around Muni, parking, and bike lanes in SF's eastern and southeast neighborhoods.

Updated with new version of the map here [PDF].

At first (and second) glance, this block in south SoMa appears to have cars parked across what clearly looks to be a sidewalk. The area in question is up on a curb, has curb-level sidewalks leading to it from the streets that intersect on either side of the block, and even has both a trash can and fire hydrant on it. If there's somehow another a sidewalk there, it's nowhere to be found.

SFpark has released new comprehensive stats collected during its two-year pilot program phase, documenting the numerous benefits that it garnered by pricing parking according to demand. SFpark is being watched closely by cities around the world, since it's the first program to thoroughly test demand-based parking pricing principles first professed by UCLA's Donald Shoup. But the SFMTA hasn't yet adopted one of Shoup's key recommended strategies: Giving some of the revenue to local community benefit districts to help win support for parking meters.

The SF Chronicle published its take on the SFMTA's proposed network of permitted stops for private shuttles. These proposed stops would re-purpose 0.01 percent of the city's on-street parking supply as white zones. According to the Chronicle, that equates to Google buses "devouring parking," as its headline puts it.

The Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 yesterday to reject an appeal, filed by sustainable transportation advocates, to require environmental review of the SFMTA's repeal of Sunday parking meters. Although the vote was not on the merits of Sunday parking metering, but rather whether the SFMTA violated the California Environmental Quality Act in repealing it, the hearing shed some more light on the political stances of some supervisors.

Just four days before San Jose's City Council was expected to approve the Diridon Station Area Plan, a four-year-old community-based plan to guide the next 30 years of transit-oriented redevelopment around the Diridon Caltrain Station, city officials released a memo on June 6, proposing numerous amendments in response to City Council questions and public comments made at the council's preliminary review of the plan on May 20.

An appeal claiming that the repeal of Sunday parking meters is an action that requires environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act is baseless, according to responses issued by the SFMTA and Planning Department this week.