potrero view

January 2012

Parking

Steven J. Moss

No one likes to pay for parking.  High on the list of San Francisco indignities is taking a $45 parking ticket off your windshield, which is only slightly preferred to handing an attendant half that much for storing your car for three hours in a downtown lot. Up until now, Potrero Hill has been mostly able to avoid this expensive mortification.  With the exception of some residential permit zones — and the need to avoid street sweeping—parking has been free and ample.  

The Hill’s fertile parking fields have been a consolation prize for its isolation from public transportation.  The top of the hill is poorly served by buses.  Muni’s T-Line has improved north-south access to Dogpatch, but service on the line is notoriously bad — “T stands for terrible” shouted one 2010 blog post—and there’s no quick and easy public transit eastward.  More often than not, it’s faster to walk from Dogpatch to the Mission than take a bus, which doesn’t help the elderly, people pressed for time, or those schlepping heavy items.  

A few years ago parking meters sprouted in Showplace Square.  Because self-entitled showroom customers — who tend to stroll across Henry Adams Street as if on a catwalk — made this node an angry mess anyway, they were hardly noticed. Now, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA) wants to install meters throughout much of Dogpatch and lower Potrero Hill, under the Mission Bay Parking Management Strategy. The plan emerged as a synergistic result of the fast-developing University of California, San Francisco complex — which is drawing increasing numbers of employees and their cars to the area — an influx of federal transportation management funds, the popularity of deploying time-based pricing to commonly-shared goods — including electricity and bridge tolls — and technology.   It’s the perfect storm of free market thinking, complimentary federal money, high-technology, and the opportunity for public policy to be welded in Mission Bay, a place that’s largely governments’ creation.   

Dogpatch and Potrero Hill are mostly innocent bystanders to this effort, falling under the shadow of the Mission Bay juggernaut.  If meters are installed north of Dogpatch, the thinking goes, commuters will be pushed southward, a tsunami of would-be parkers that can only be stopped with more meters, like so many sandbags absorbing a flood.  SFMTA data — and casual experience – does suggest that more than 85 percent of Dogpatch’s spaces are full on a given weekday afternoon.  But it’s not clear that this reflects a problem so much as an indication of a healthy, mostly non-retail, production-oriented small business community.

Mission Bay is dominated by large public and private entities  — including Bayor, Merck, and, soon, Salesforce—which can afford to support employee shuttles and parking garages; there are 1,650 parking spaces spread out over five structures, and more on the way.  What’s more, neither the University of California — which is exempt—nor private sector entities — which are within a redevelopment district — pay property taxes to support the City’s general fund.  While the complex provides benefits to Dogpatch and Potrero Hill—in the form of pushing up property values, and drawing in customers for local restaurants and retailers — its negative consequences—higher housing prices, traffic congestion and increased demand for public services — are largely untaxed.  Other than meter revenues, the parking pressures caused by Mission Bay do not come with a concomitant contribution to improving public services, including transit access, in the surrounding community.

Dogpatch is full of small enterprises, employing mostly working wage San Franciscans, many of which rely on private vehicles to carry supplies to work and clients.  The neighborhood is developing just like it was envisioned in the Eastern Neighborhoods Plan, the City’s blueprint for the community’s future. There are no corporate shuttles, and the few surface parking lots cater to long-term service vehicles.  While meters would likely result in a decline in parked cars, they would serve mostly as a regressive tax—of at least $500 a year—on small business owners and their employees, the revenues for which would go into SFMTA’s mush pot, with no guarantees any of the funds would be used to increase transit access in Dogpatch or Potrero Hill.

Parking is never really free.  It’s paid for by taxpayers, who set aside and maintain space that could be used for something else, and through the public health and environmental consequences of automobile use. But its availability contributes to economic productivity, and, in the absence of good transportation alternatives, a better quality of life. Ongoing growth – medium-rise residential buildings are being steadily constructed throughout Dogpatch, and Pier 70 will ultimately, and massively, be developed—will soon enough require new parking policies to be adopted in the community, including strategic meter deployments on such true retail corridors as portions of Third and 18th streets.  But these policies should be informed by the neighborhood’s character and needs, and matched with a comprehensive plan to get people where they want to go, rather than an out-of-context canned solution, no matter how innovative or federally-subsidized. 

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