Curb Space

It’s no secret that it can be difficult to park in San Francisco. But have you ever wondered why it may be so hard? In this episode, we discuss curb management and find out why available parking spaces seem to be so scarce in some SF neighborhoods. We hit the streets to see how curb management works and promotes safety. And we get tips on how to find parking with a minimum of frustration and how to use our new, more accessible parking meters and pay stations. 

SFMTA Parking and Curb Management Policy Manager Hank Willson, Transportation Planner Shayda Rager, Senior Planner Brian Manford, Parking Meter Program Manager Tony Massetti and Parking Enforcement Supervisor Lisa Rodriguez all appear in the episode.

Transcript

MELISSA CULROSS, HOST: If you drive in San Francisco, you know what it’s like to look for parking. But there are reasons parking sometimes seems to be so scarce.

SHAYDA RAGER, SFMTA TRANSPORTATION PLANNER: We try really hard to balance the curb so that it meets everybody’s needs.

MELISSA: Welcome to Taken with Transportation, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s official podcast. I’m your host, Melissa Culross, and in this episode, we’re talking about parking. We know that finding space on the streets of SF for your car can be … let’s say a challenge.

 DRIVER-1: Parking is generally a nightmare (laughter). I’ve, I’ve lived here for 25 years, probably. So, I know the, the city pretty well and the parking spaces, but we just hope and pray.

 DRIVER-2: Ah, so, that feeling when you finally find a parking space … it’s like getting an ice cream cone from the ice cream truck on a warm summer day. 

 DRIVER-3: I do on occasion park in places that are not parking spaces.

 MELISSA: Have you been ticketed?

 DRIVER-3: Yes.

MELISSA: So, the question is: why is it such a challenge? The answer … says SFMTA Parking and Curb Management Policy Manager Hank Willson … begins with the city itself.

HANK WILLSON, SFMTA POLICY MANAGER FOR PARKING AND CURB MANAGEMENT: Well, San Francisco has the second highest population density of any major city behind, of course, New York City. But San Francisco also has highest car density of any major city; more than L.A.; more than New York; more than any other city in the country. And what that means is that we’ve got a lot of people. We have a very limited amount of streets and curb space, and the streets aren’t getting any longer. The curbs aren’t getting any longer. And that means that not everybody who might wanna drive is going to be able to expect to drive up to a business or their apartment building or their house and find parking right in front. So, that’s why we have a curb management team. That’s why we do what we do. We need people to take turns. We need people to come in, if they’re driving, use the space for only as long as they need to for the purpose that they need to. And then when they’re done, move along. Don’t just linger. Don’t leave your car there for hours or days at a time because other people are coming behind you and are gonna need that space.

MELISSA: Willson tells us that a lot has changed in San Francisco over the years, but one very significant thing has not.

HANK: Anyone who’s lived in the city or spent time in the city for the past few decades can see that it has certainly gotten busier. Cars have gotten a lot bigger. I think that’s sort of an underappreciated aspect of why it’s considered hard to find parking. Cars are bigger than they used to be. And if cars are averaging ten percent longer than they did ten or 15 years ago, you can do a straight-line calculation that that’s ten percent fewer parking spaces all of a sudden that are available on the streets of San Francisco. But I think it’s also important to know that there’s about 275,000 on-street parking spaces in San Francisco. About ten percent of them are metered. And it’s the same now as it was when I started here 15 years ago. So, the vast majority of parking in San Francisco doesn’t have a price. You can either park there for free for a couple hours or for free for a couple of days. And we have certainly put in some transit lanes and bike lanes that have removed parking in some places. Though we often take pains to try to replace those parking spaces nearby. So, I think, you know, it certainly feels like San Francisco’s a different place. And it certainly is a different place, but in terms of parking regulations, a lot has remained the same. 

MELISSA: And this is where our work to regulate curb space, especially along commercial corridors, comes in. We need to make sure there is a place for everyone who needs to pull over … to park, to make deliveries or for whatever reason.

HANK: Parking and curb management really are a safety thing. We do these things because we are trying to minimize double parking. Minimize circling. And double parking and circling are safety issues. And they’re causing more emissions as cars are circling around or sitting there idling. We’d much rather people be pulled to the curb and stopped than sitting there, you know, belching out emissions.

MELISSA: It’s one thing to talk about curb management, it’s another thing to see it in action. So, we head outside to meet with Transportation Planner Shayda Rager.

SHAYDA RAGER, SFMTA TRANSPORTATION PLANNER: We are on Divisadero, between Fell and … Hayes? Yes. We’re next to a loading zone. There are two trucks that have just finished their loading. And they’re going off to their next destination it seems. 
 
 MELISSA: So, on a block like this, you know, somebody who’s driving might be, like, “Ugh, loading zones!” Why are they important?
 
 SHAYDA: Good question. Divisadero is a commercial corridor, which means there are a ton of businesses sandwiched together. It’s mixed-use. So, there’s residential housing, um, mixed in with, uh, all these businesses. And, as you can hear, there’s a lot of traffic going down, too. So, I like to say that parking is the most controversial topic in San Francisco, and it’s because everybody needs access to the curb. Everybody. Even if you’re walking, you need to get on that sidewalk so you can stay away from that traffic. So, we have parklets using the curb. We have merchants who need to do their loading using the curb. We have customers who need to find parking. And we even have other types of loading, for example, like Door Dash or Uber and Lyft who wanna get people and, and food to their destinations.

MELISSA: So, what if we didn’t have the loading zones we’re looking at here?

SHAYDA-2: These trucks are pretty large. And if they double park on the street, and there’s only one lane of traffic, or even two lanes of traffic, double parking creates unpredictable travel behavior. And so, you don’t know when that car is going to start moving or stop moving. There might be bikes trying to get around. You’re trying to cross the street, and that truck might be blocking your visibility. And so, we need to create space that is allocated for loading so that these big trucks can do their business and get in and get out as fast as possible.

MELISSA: Okay, but what should someone who needs a parking space do? Understanding and respecting the need for yellow loading zones … which we certainly do … doesn’t change the fact that people who drive need a place to put their cars. Don’t worry, Rager has some advice for us.

SHAYDA: I like to ask my friends, “When do you start looking for parking? Do you start looking as soon as you get to your destination? Or do you start looking maybe one-to-two blocks away?” And I find that when I’m in San Francisco, if I start looking for parking when I’m about two blocks away, I will find a spot. And people think I have this, like, really great karma around parking because I work in parking. But I think that’s really the strategy around it. It’s just start looking one-to-two blocks away, and you’ll enjoy the stroll to wherever you wanna get to, uh, when you find your parking space. 
 
 MELISSA: That’s a very good point because it does not rain much here. It doesn't get very hot. It's a very good city for walking. But not everybody can walk.
 
 SHAYDA: True.
 
 MELISSA: So, how do we also balance things like, um, disabled parking spaces?
 
 SHAYDA: Yes, great question. We have a, uh, federal obligation where, uh, whenever we touch the curb, we must ensure that we provide 4% of the parking towards accessible blue zones. So, you look at the entire corridor. You, you figure out how much parking is there. And then you allocate around 4% to making sure that blue zones exist. And then there’s also a very tricky way to identify locations for blue zones because you want to make sure that they have access to a curb ramp; they can properly get into a wheelchair or be able to use their cane. And you have to think about street furniture and if that conflicts with the door.

MELISSA: And she has some extra tips.

SHAYDA: Here are the cheat codes, I would say. Alright, not necessarily entirely cheat codes, but… Just because you see a yellow zone does not necessarily mean you can’t park there. For example, if you’re trying to do something really quick, you actually have the ability to be there for three minutes to do a quick in and out. You have three minutes. I believe you have to stay, someone has to stay at the wheel, but, uh, if you just wanna grab something really quick and get back into your car, and the loading zone is there, you got three minutes. Another thing is: Look at the signs. For example, there are loading zones that are in effect from Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. If it’s outside of those hours, you can park there. And then … what else? Make sure you pay for parking. If it’s a metered street, and you don’t pay, that’s definitely gonna get you a ticket. So, that’s another thing. And then, make sure you’re not parking in a street cleaning zone when that’s in effect. That is gonna guarantee you a ticket. We need to make sure those streets are cleaned up. Street cleaning signs are there for that reason.

MELISSA: We leave Divisadero Street and walk over to Haight and Fillmore. On the way there, we pass through a residential parking area on our way to another commercial sector. And Rager has still more parking suggestions.

SHAYDA: The way you look for parking is: Are there signs overhead or even on the parking meter that dictate hours. Like, for example, if it’s a yellow zone, when are, is the yellow zone in effect? How long are you gonna be here for? If you’re only gonna be here for two hours, look for a general metered parking space. Most of them are usually two hours. Pay the amount and then go have dinner, enjoy a movie, then come back and, um, go where you need to go next. Make sure … I can’t, I can’t stress it enough … make sure you read the signs. If it’s a tow-away, tow-away zone, make sure you’re not there when the tow away’s in effect, you will get your car towed, and it’s not a fun experience. I have gone through it. Um, and, and if you don’t have to use a car, take the bus. There’s so many buses here. Right now, the 7 is passing us. It doesn't seem too crowded, uh, and it will get you where you need to go, especially if it’s on a dedicated bus lane.

MELISSA: And above all else, Rager … and all of us at the agency … do get it. 

SHAYDA: I understand it’s really hard to look for parking in the city. I, I drive, and it’s difficult for me, as well. We, we try really hard to balance the curb so that it meets everybody’s needs. Whether you have accessibility, uh, needs. Whether you wanna take the bus. Whether you are a Door Dash driver, and you need to pull over at a five-minute general loading zone to grab the food and run out to your next destination. We’re trying to be very, very thoughtful. And we just want to make sure that everyone has access to the curb. :29

MELISSA: Now, once you have parked your car in a metered area, you need to pay. And we want to make that as user-friendly as possible. In fact, we just finished a city-wide parking meter upgrade and replaced thousands of old meters with new ones and with new multi-space pay stations. To go over how to use them, we’re joined by Parking Meter Program Manager Tony Massetti. He starts with a pay station on South Van Ness Avenue near Mission Street.

TONY MASSETTI, SFMTA PARKING METER PROGRAM MANAGER: What I really like about these machines is that on our pay stations, we have a full color display. So, everything’s big and bright, and you can see exactly what you’re trying to do. You know, there’s multiple ways to interact with this machine, but, like, for someone who’s just pulling up and parking on the street, you can walk up the machine, you can wake it up, and it’s gonna run you through some prompts. Right, it’s gonna ask you for, you know, uh, license plate number. So, once you have entered in a license plate number, and I’ll just put in some letters here, for … then you would, you know, go ahead and hit “confirm.” There’s gonna be a second, you know, while it’s checking because these things are connected to the internet, like, 24-7 now. And as you’re putting your license plate in, it’s actually cross checking the license plate to make sure you haven’t already paid for parking. So, after I put in the license plate, you can adjust your time, right. We’ve got some buttons here that help us do that. There’s a “plus” sign, a “minus” sign, and then a “max time.” But once I’ve, you know, made the selection on time, I can hit, you know, “confirm” and say yes, this is what I wanna do. And it’s gonna think about it for a second here. It’s telling me already “Put your payment in.” What’s really neat about these machines is we have multiple ways to pay now. You’ve got the traditional put your coin in the coin slot method. We can insert a credit card into the credit card slot method. But we also have tap and pay, which is really big for folks that, you know, use Google Pay or Apple Pay. Very convenient, very quick and easy. You don’t have to worry about things like skimmers or things like that. Uh, you just tap it and go. And then it will complete the transaction here. You’ll get a receipt, uh, just for proof of payment.

MELISSA: And just down the street on the next block, we find some new meters.

TONY: There’s a few items to know about this meter compared to the pay station that are different. They don’t have a full color display. So, that is one thing. You can notice the backlight on it isn’t as bright. Other than that, this has got all the same language features. It’s something else that, you know, is new to our single space meters here in the city. We used to just be able to do English[RS1] [MC2]  and Spanish, but we actually have simplified Chinese on the, uh, single space meters, as well now. This meter also has the tap and pay, which I think is super cool. People are really, really adopting this. I mean, I think the last time we checked when we were looking into our metrics on payment types and how people were paying the meters, I wanna say it was over 85% of all credit card payments at our meters are made by tap and pay now. So, really just trying to make ‘em as easy as possible for anybody to use.

MELISSA: We can’t really talk about parking without talking about enforcement. Our hard-working parking control officers … or PCOs … are out in the streets making sure we all follow the rules. Parking Enforcement Supervisor Lisa Rodriguez gets a little more specific about what PCOs do.

LISA RODRIGUEZ, PARKING ENFORCEMENT SUPERVISOR: Keep the traffic moving, citing where cars are parked illegally and a lot, a lot of customer service. We get questions: “Where can we park? Why did I get this ticket?” We’re just really helping the city move, helping businesses and then the residents.

MELISSA: And that help includes customer service. PCOs field a lot of questions. They’ll often suggest that people call 3-1-1, the city’s customer service center, but they also answer questions themselves.

LISA: When you see that PCO, and you know offhand exactly what you wanna ask, nine times out of ten, they’re able to help. They’re able to direct you, tell you what you need to park in that neighborhood.

MELISSA: And the best way to repay a PCO for their help is with kindness.

LISA: What we do like to hear is “Thank you.” That goes a long way because it is a thankless job. So, when I was a PCO, it kinda put a smile on my face.

MELISSA: We catch up with PCO Tina … who does not want us to use her last name … on Chestnut Street in the Marina. She reiterates what Rodriquez says about kindness, including and especially if you discover that a parking control officer is about to cite you, and you want to plead your case.

TINA, PARKING CONTROL OFFICER: To me, communication’s the key. If they come where they’re respectful, they’re nice, I let ‘em go. I don’t get paid per ticket, so I’m not out here being a ticket warrior.

MELISSA: Plus, Tina was well prepared for this job.

TINA: I come from the background of social work. I have social work skills. My degree is in social work. I used to work with the community, with the homeless. So, I have more empathy for people. I’m not out here trying to take money from people ‘cause at one point, I was on this side, uh, of the coin. So, I understand.

MELISSA: Some people might assume that parking fees and citations are all about making the agency money. Certainly, parking is part of our revenue, but we don’t cite people or install parking meters just for the money. Once again, Hank Willson, our parking and curb management policy manager.

HANK: We install parking meters because they’re still the best tool that cities have for actually creating parking availability, especially in high-density commercial districts where there’s just a lot of demand. The parking meter was invented in Oklahoma City in 1937. The first parking meter was installed in San Francisco in 1947 on Polk Street. Back then, businesses were actively requesting parking regulations. And they were saying, you know, we’re in a busy part of town. We need space for our customers to find parking, and there’s no parking regulations. So, that means people, they come in, they park, they go to their house. Or they go to their office, and they leave their car for days at a time. And then there’s no space for my customers to park.

MELISSA: But Willson understands why it may appear that we only charge people to park because we want that revenue.

HANK: I think one of the challenges is that, because we’ve had parking meters in San Francisco since the 40s and 50s in most of our commercial districts, everyone is already used to the positive effect that meters have in terms of creating parking turnover and creating parking availability. And so, that’s all they know. And so, it feels like this is just a money grab when, really, if we took all those parking meters away, I think a lot of folks who run businesses would find that they were actually doing a really great service to them. That because San Francisco is, is such a dense mixed-use city where there are apartments above most of the businesses in our commercial districts or right around the corner, and a lot of those folks have cars, and if they could park right on Valencia or Polk or Hayes, uh, and leave their cars there for days at a time, they probably would. Um, if it were free to do so.

MELISSA: One of the things we’re always trying to do at the SFMTA is innovate … and that definitely is true when it comes to parking. As we mentioned earlier in the episode, we recently upgraded our parking meters. We’re also trying new things to accommodate how much busier the city has become. And one of those things is our Pay or Permit program. Since the 1970s, residents of San Francisco’s different neighborhoods have been able to buy permits that allow them to park on un-metered streets near their homes without having to worry about time limits. People without those residential permits usually only can stay for a couple of hours or so.

Now, after significant study and planning, we have introduced a program that allows people to park as long as they want if they either have a permit or pay a meter. We have rolled this out in Hayes Valley, and that’s where we’re talking with Senior Planner Brian Manford. He leads the Pay or Permit project.

BRIAN MANFORD, SFMTA SENIOR PLANNER: Hayes Valley was chosen because there was ongoing, like, planning work in the neighborhood. And so, some of that work included parking changes, um, and it’s a neighborhood that’s seen a lot of development after the freeway removal. So, it’s near Civic Center. So, you have the big performance venues that attract people, especially in the evenings, the government offices and other offices. And then you have kind of a growing commercial corridor along and off of Hayes Street. So, a lot of reasons for people to be coming into the neighborhood throughout the day that were making parking more challenging. So, the traditional RPP with the two-hour time limits; it just wasn’t working well enough for a lot of the blocks.

MELISSA: So, how does Pay or Permit work, exactly?

BRIAN: Anyone who has a permit today or is eligible for a permit: The price doesn’t change, the process doesn’t change, the eligibility doesn’t change. And if you have a permit, you’re exempted from any time limits, other than the 72-hour stay and street sweeping. For people who don’t have permits, typically visitors, they have to pay by the hour. There’s no time limit. And we have pay-by-phone and as well as you can pay at the meter station.

MELISSA: Manford says that Pay or Permit has freed up an average of one parking space per block in the neighborhood. And it appears that people who live here have been able to find parking closer to their homes. So, the next step is expanding the program into areas where we think it may work. 

BRIAN: Neighborhoods where there’s a lot of visitors; neighborhoods where there’s, uh, like, a high demand for parking, where it can be hard to find parking. And there’s a data side, but then there’s the neighborhood side. So, we wanna talk to the neighbors. We wanna talk to the groups in the neighborhoods and see if it seems like a good fit.
 
 MELISSA: And if there are neighborhoods that don’t want it, we’re not imposing it on them?
 
 BRIAN: We are not. It’s about a collaborative relationship with our neighborhoods. Yeah, especially when it comes to parking. Um, it’s very personal. It’s very passionate. It can be very emotional. And so, we really want to be very sensitive as to how people are feeling about it. And if it doesn’t feel right? You know, we wanna listen to them.

MELISSA: At the end of the day, parking in San Francisco can be uniquely challenging because the city is unique. And isn’t that why we love it here? Hank Willson.

HANK: We don’t have big suburban parking lots, with a couple of exceptions if you go to Stonestown or something like that. But for the most part, what makes our commercial districts so great is that they’re not just big oceans of parking lots where you have to walk half a mile to get from your car, um, into the shop that you wanna go to. And that’s what makes our neighborhoods so wonderful and so livable and what makes them accessible if you’re someone who doesn’t have a car, and you’re riding the bus or riding your bike, or you’re just walking there because you live nearby. I think sometimes people can be understandably frustrated by the number of parking regulations that are out there. The number of parking signs, sometimes they can be a little confusing. But I think it, it sort of stands to reason that we’re probably going to have pretty dense thicket of parking regulations because what we’re trying to do is, is make sure people only stay as long as they need to.

MELISSA: Thank you for joining us on Taken with Transportation. We’re a production of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, and you can find the latest episodes at SFMTA.com-slash-Podcast, as well as Apple, Spotify, our YouTube channel or wherever you listen. We should note that as of the recording and publication of this episode, most parking meters and pay stations in San Francisco have a two-hour time limit. But soon that will be changing to a four-hour limit. I’m Melissa Culross. Be well and travel well.

 [RS1]missing a word, maybe "show"

 [MC2]You are correct, Shayda …. Thank you! Sometimes things, such as the word “do” in this case, get lost in transcription.