Your Commute

There's no denying there's a certain luxury to the automobile. You leave the house when you want; there's no waiting in the howling wind vainly straining your neck to see if that N Judah's ever going to peek its little head around the corner; you always have a seat.... But the downside of driving is, of course, the DPT.

Come take a hilarious tour of the Kafka-like bowels of parking enforcement with Gavin Newsom in today's Chronicle! Where an average of 565 people per day routinely wait in line for over an hour to find out.... that they're in the wrong line! One man profiled in the article waited for two and a half hours before leaving in disgust, and another man had already waited over two hours for a parking permit.

Part of the problem is that they make it difficult for people to pick up, complain about, or pay for anything in any other way other than in person. Another part of the problem is that they've only got 37 people (they're 15 people short of the target of 52) working to process over two million parking tickets a year. Yet another part of the problem is that for some reason, they never got around to installing one of those "take a number" systems so that you wouldn't have to actually stand there in line like someone waiting for Phish tickets or something.

Anyways, Gavin Newsom stopped by earlier this week and spluttered, "It's an embarrassment. I should go even further: It's absolutely unacceptable. There's no excuse." The icing on the cake? Because the lines are so long and there's no real way to get to Howard and 10th conveniently on public transportation, almost everyone gets a parking ticket at the 60-minute-limit meters on the street. Follow the sad saga of the man crying out, "Oh s---!" as he watches from the line as his car gets another ticket slapped on the front!

Picture from Wikipedia