Brickbat: No Free Parking

San Francisco officials estimate the city will lose 14,000 parking places—5 percent of its total—when a new state law takes effect Jan. 1, 2025. The law bars anyone from parking on the street within 20 feet of a crosswalk. Sponsors say the law will improve pedestrian safety. It did not include funding for local governments to remove parking meters or to mark the zones as "no parking."

Comments

[AT]

Meh, just an effort by the city to create more space for tents and de facto public restrooms.

[Don't look at me!]

This.

[Hendo]

Good one, geniuses!

You might have a point if this were a city ordinance, but it's not; it's a state law. Which is what the article says.

[AT]

A state law clearly designed to benefit Frisco the most, in a statewide effort to open up cities - especially Frisco where it's most wanted - to more vagrancy and fecal matter.

[Vernon Depner]

5% of the parking spaces are withing 20 feet of a crosswalk? That sounds very unlikely.

[John F. Carr]

Every intersection is a legal crosswalk.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

If 5% is 20 feet, then 100% is 400 feet. That's one city block, 13 blocks per mile.

Sounds perfectly cromulent as to the measurements.

[Rossami]

Assuming the crosswalks on all sides of the intersection (normal for city streets), you're actually losing 40 feet per block - 20 at each end. Add a mid-block crossing and you lose another 40 feet - 20' on either side.

5% is probably a low-ball estimate for the most city sections where parking is hardest to find.

[Hendo]

Exactly.

I live in San Francisco, on a pretty typical block for my neighborhood. I don't have a garage, so I'm very conscious of the number of parking spaces near my apartment. On my block, if everyone parks optimally, leaving as much room as possible for other cars, there are are basically 32 regular car spaces, plus maybe two or three others that can fit one of those tiny Smart cars.

The city has been saying that they're not going to strictly measure the 20 feet, and that they will basically enforce a distance of one full car length from the corner, or about 15 feet. But even if they do this level of "lenient" enforcement, it will still effectively eliminate 3 of the 32 spaces, which is almost ten percent of the spaces on my block alone.

[NOTE: The reason it won't eliminate 4 spaces is that there is a driveway right near the corner on one side of the block, so no-one can park there anyway.]

[markm23]

They probably already had a setback from each intersection, as well as short setbacks from crosswalks in the middle of a block. This might have lengthened the setbacks, causing the loss of some parking, but less than 40 feet per block.

[John F. Carr]

The law allows cities to opt out by passing an ordinance allowing parking in the forbidden zone.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB413

[Adans smith]

With all the stores leaving the downtown I'd say there's plenty of parking.

[markm23]

In the business district, maybe - these usually have parking lots or garages accommodating most of the demand for customer parking, because otherwise the stores get few customers. But in a dense residential district with little off-street parking, it's not uncommon for there to be a shortage of on-street parking when all the tenants are in for the night. This is especially true for old neighborhoods that were fully built up when only the richest families owned cars. I expect that in San Francisco, this includes all lower to middle-class neighborhoods rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake and fire; this work would have been completed before the Model T brought car prices down, and any space left empty would be too steep to build or park cars on.

[Fist of Etiquette]

WHY ISN'T THE CITY WALKABLE?

[mad.casual]

With the monstrous clowder of owner-less, self-driving cars continually circling, waiting to swoop down and whisk any and all would-be commuters away to any and all destinations, I don't see what the problem is.

[Longtobefree]

Ever hear the term 'contour line' ?

[markm23]

Because very few Americans would consider walking to someplace 3 miles away, so most of nearly every city is "outside walking distance". Many won't even walk 1 mile, and I've known people that would take their car to drive two blocks to the gym!

Most American cities are also spread out too much for mass transit to give good service - the bus routes are too far apart, the buses take too long running their route (it's an inevitable problem whenever a large bus or a train must stop with all it's passengers every time 1 needs to get off), often the hours of operation are too short for people that work early or late, and everywhere the government has to pay most of the costs of keeping the system running or they would have to price rides too high for most of the people that use it because they can't afford cars or taxis.

[Sometimes a Great Notion]

Meh, San Fran lost 34,000 people over the last few years, so it balances out.

[Eeyore]

This is a boon to the owners of garages.

[Its_Not_Inevitable]

So Big Garage is ultimately behind this new state law.

[Vesicant]

So much ado about nothing, so typical of 'reason.' Over 40 states already have laws prohibiting parking within 20 feet of crosswalks. Why aren't you sniveling about that? It's a safety issue, plain and simple, it's a statewide law, and using San Francisco to claim it's coddling the homeless is just stupid.

sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2024/01/crb_memo_daylighting_-_other_states.pdf

[Himoss23]

Reason didn't make a big deal out of the law; they pointed out that true-to-form California passed an unfunded mandate.