August 14, 2007
Meter Maid Assaults Escalate in SF
According to NPR, it seems both Los Angeles and San Francisco are in the habit of slashing the tires of and beating the crap out of our dear meter maids -- now more than ever before.
The absurdity of SF's parking ticket-dispensing habits aside, this is awful.
A year ago, we saw a couple of altercations on Valencia Street, with vile douche bags puffing up their flaccid feathers at hard-working meter maids (meter-men? parking attendants?), but we had no idea that this was getting physical, increasingly so.
NPR also claims that the California Assembly plans to "double the maximum fine for assault on parking enforcement officers."
Thanks to one of our tipsters for the info.
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I was just thinking that an 'ask a metermaid' feature would be perfect for this site. Similar to 'ask a MUNI driver'.
I saw what I thought almost developed into an assault the other morning, near Union & Stockton. Some incredibly important person was in the face of the metermaid shrieking "DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM?" over and over again. Someone walking by in the other direction shouted back "No. Why don't you tell us?" and that sort of dissipated the incident.
I have no idea who that very important person was. It wasn't the Mayor or any identifiable supervisor. Or maybe they had a night of heavy partying in North Beach, forgot who they were and wondered if the metermaid might know?
Parking Control Officer
What do you mean by "The absurdity of SF's parking ticket-dispensing habits"? Do you think we should just allow people to park their vehicles wherever the hell they want? Should people not be ticketed for parking their damned vehicles on the sidewalks or in crosswalks? Or do you mean that you shouldn't have to pay to park on the street? At least it is nice that you don't think parking control officers should have the shit beat out of them.
That's an awesome idea, guest #1. Ask a Meter Maid (aka, Parking Control Officer)! Asking a few pointed questions would be much more constructive than punching them in the solar plexus (but a small kick to the shins would feel so SO gratifying).
this town cracks me up. people park illegally on the median on Valencia, then act like little spoiled brats when they get ticketed.
typical SF. you love to impose rules on others but never on yourselves...you're all so fucking special and your high rent or mortgage justifies acting like a jerk. but everyone ELSE has to be obedient.
no wonder gavin's getting re-elected.
guest 4 - perhaps the absurdity they're noting is that there isn't ENOUGH parking enforcement; lots of us are dissatisfied with DPT because they don't do enough to control the rampant double-parking on busy streets that causes huge traffic jams, delays buses, etc.
BUILD MORE GARAGES!!
that's the only way to deal with it. Yes, people SHOULD park in the (absolutely useless) median on Valencia with impunity because this idiotic city refuses to build parking garages that are desperately needed. Guess what - your very jobs and economy are suffering, because without vast suburbia surrounding and providing steady supply of weekend visitors to this tiny city it wouldn't possibly survive with so many restaurants, cafes and such night life! but nooo, we do everything possible to (literally) drive these people away.
Go here: http://www.cuipsf.org/main.cfm?actionId=globalShowStaticContent&screenKey=cmpMedia&s=cuip&showarchives=1
and watch "Meter Maid Double Standard, February 13, 2007" before you whine more about poor meter maids.
and where would you build these fucking garages? the property in this town is worth a fortune....are you seriously suggesting that people will buy 800k-2m properties and knock down profitable potential condo developments and the like for fucking garages??
y'r a bg dt, and guess what? y sck ss. y r t dmb to realize that when the land is expensive people don't build shit like fucking garages for your fat ass SUV and your fat ass suburban bullshit....condos and rental buildings make more money than shithold garages, asshole.
econ 101, try looking in to it instead of douchebag PC college classes, fckr.
Only little people pay taxes parking meters!
-Leona Helmsley
d'oh, my <strike> tag around taxes was eaten.
It's gotta be because of alcohol. Please tell me it's because of alcohol, and not because sober San Franciscans actually think the expense of owning a car here not only justifies breaking parking laws but also punching out anyone who tries to enforce them. That can't be it. Can it?
Where the hell are the meter enforcement robots when cars double park in rows taking up entire lanes on a block, just because they are going to church on Sunday?
Is this Vatican City or something?
In memory of Tammy Faye, all good church folk please refrain from flaming me.
[4] & [7] Yes, I don't think *enough* people get ticketed. And for folks bitching about the lack of parking in the Mission, there are tons of Muni routes that will do you good. And if you don't like Muni? You can always use your feet. Let's stop enabling car-addicted people.
And for the record, I do own a car but I rarely drive apart from my commute.
the church double parking is annoying. but how about the ridiculous street sweeping laws. i've never actually seen them sweep the streets, just ticket people. once a week?? is that really necessary?
This is the kind of behavior you get from people on welfare. Parking should be market rate.
iris,
where do you park this car? we have a real problem here if you don't live and work next to a muni stop. get over it people that do. consider yourself lucky.
we need to force apartments and condos to have one parking space per unit. get the cars off the street. they can be underground or in the sky, i don't care, but get them off the street.
things are only going to get worse as we continue to kid ourselves about this issue, continue trying to balance the budget on the backs of working folks with 50.00 tickets for being 1 minute late.
those of you who do work for a living, get the card with money on it for sf parking meters. keep it in your wallet so you never have to beg for change. it will keep you out of trouble 90% of the time.
Sounds like another case where we need to just Tazer folks - Tazer the shiot out of 'em until they learn. When they're dumb as dogs, you gotta train 'em like dogs I say.
Meter maids should get real jobs.
Guest [9], let's do a little math.
Say you have 30 parking spots. You charge $5 flat rate for evening parking. Assume parking spots turn over at least once per night. That's $300/night. Times 30 nights/month equals $9000/month. That's roughly $100k/yr. At $1M property...10 yr payback. Note that this does not inlcude daytime parking. Figure that in and you're talking about a 5-yr roi before it's 100% profit. (labor is negligible)
On the same lot you buy for $1M, you tear put up a 3-unit for $600k. You can rent it our for $3k x 3 or $9k/month. This is the same income as the parking lot, but youv'e spent an additional $600k plus taxes.
Parking is something that is desperately needed in this town. Transit first is good, but denying the fact that a majority of living units have at least 1 car is borderline negligent. The public transit system is designed to take people from outlying areas of the city into downtown. It is not, for example, set up to take someone from the outer richmond into northbeach very efficiently. A 10 minute drive is more than an hour commute, plus waiting for transfers.
touche j!
well said!
the radical left in this town without cars or real jobs will never see the logic in that statement of course
J's statement ignores two things: appreciation of the value of the units, and the social cost of more parking. More parking equals more total cars in the neighborhood, more traffic, slower MUNI, etc. I'm not able to quantify the economic value of that social cost, but surely someone out there can. Takers?
To me, saying "If we don't give them parking they won't have cars" is equivalent to saying "If we don't give them condoms they won't have sex" In reality, it just doesn’t add up.
Comments of guest post #9 are completely out of bounds.
How the hell do posts like that get left up here? Same goes for the threats by #18 for that matter. Have some basic decency people. WTF?
Once you accommodate all these extra cars by providing parking spaces for them, how do you expect they'll get from one place to the next? Is there any example, anywhere, of an increasing in the quantity of parking leading to a decrease in congestion? Does L.A., where most neighborhood zoning requires two (2!) parking spaces per unit, lack traffic?
Look:
A San Francisco that has "enough" parking is
1. Impossible.
2. Nothing you would recognize as "San Francisco."
Sure, you like it here. You like visiting the exciting neighborhoods or whatever. You, just you, wanting to drive here isn't a big deal. Hell, drive out to North Beach, park right in front of Caffe Trieste. Not a problem; you're the only one trying to park. And look, a beautiful city around you. Look at all the people walking, the people playing in the park, all the little shops, restaurants, all that city stuff. Now, imagine all the people you see also wanted to drive here. First, you're going to have to give up your space, most likely. You're going to have to go to the big garage like most everyone else. The garage is conveniently located at, say, Powell and Green. It is about half the size of the garage at 5th and Mission. Where it sits there were once about 20 buildings, some purely residential, some mixed use, some very pretty, some oddball eyesores. Neat places though, very "San Francisco." But at least you can park. Look: this is just one of the changes that parking brings to a landscape. I'm not much of a preservationist, per se, but I do believe that parking is a destructive force to a certain kind of urban landscape. It changes how people move around it, interact with it, behave towards it, behave in it. To imagine that parking can be created without impacting its surroundings, without impacting the streets that lead to it, is delusional.
If you want a parking space, move to Walnut Creek! The city is too crowded, I don't even have closet space in my $721K, 1 bedroom house in the ghetto and you want parking spaces all over town just waiting for your fat ass. You need to get real!!!!! You also need to think about blood for oil, global warming and your bad driving skills!
if you give someone a safe place to park, they are much more likely to take muni or walk, since they dont have to check their car for vandalism or move it for a meter maid every day.
chew on that.
;)
fight the system not the working people! duh!
Yes, my statement does ignore those two items, and probably several more. However, I don't agree with your logic that creating adequate parking for existing cars EQUALS more total cars, etc. I believe that the two are mutually independent.
I'm not going to go out and buy another car simply because I get another parking spot.
I could also argue that adding parking will speed up MUNI...DPT would be able to more easily enforce the no double parking laws.
I would agree, however, that traffic might increase on the roads a bit.
What is this asinine gibberish about San Francisco needing more parking spaces downtown? What I'm reading between the lines is that folks want more free and cheap parking because there's a helluva lot of parking spots in the downtown parking garages available most of the time - probably because folks are gambling with the cheaper, underpriced street parking.
When you can shoot a cannon ball through most of the downtown parking garages without touching anything most hours of the day, who is the idiot that truly believes we need more parking spaces downtown? The solution is to make better use of the parking we already have - and step one is to jack up the prices on the street parking and improve enforcement so that folks who work downtown and choose to drive will have much more incentive to park their cars in a parking garage than to play "Time to move my car" every 2 freaking hours.
@suckafree
I work at a place with nothing but street parking and that has street cleaning 3 out of 5 days a week, so I feel ya on the parking crunch, I do. I've gotten my share of tickets, and I don't make much money at all, so they hurt.
As for living at a place on a Muni line, yeah, I had to decide that myself. It was part of my apartment criteria. That and a bathtub. Sure, I had to bypass a lot of neighborhoods that I would have loved to live in because of the lack of parking. Sometimes we can't have what we want. Period.
The point I was trying to make was that there are a lot of people in SF who have a very car-dependent mentality. If we're going out for a night on the town, do we *really* need to drive if it's in the city? Most people in other cities get by just fine with public transit, which brings us back to SF's chicken in the egg problem: People drive because Muni sucks. Because so many people drive, Muni stays broken.
suckafree...
"we have a real problem here if you don't live and work next to a muni stop."
Unless you are in jail, I doubt you were forced to live not near a MUNI stop. I live where I do specifically because of proximity to transit. Now you want to screw up my neighborhood by building a parking garage in my neighborhood so you can drive here? Get a bike.
Rant and rave about this all you want folks - the issue here isn't whether or not there is enough parking in SF, (come on we all know there isn't) and we all know there are too many tickets given out here.
The issue is that Parking control officers are just doing their jobs, sure getting a ticket sucks, but that is no reason to yell, curse or bash someone's face in. Common decency folks and just be glad you don't have a job where someone can show thier displeasure by attacking you.
J,
Sorry I'm late on this, but...it's akin to the Los Angeles freeway problem. No matter how many lanes they put in, the traffic is still awful. If you make it that much easier to park, that many more people will decide it's worth it to have a car in the city, they bring in cars and...you're back where you started.
I agree that improving SF's transit (at least within and to the NE quadrant of the city) is the best way out of its mess. The alternative, building more parking and letting MUNI wither away even more, just brings us down a slippery slope and ruins the things that make SF great, as #25 and #34 point out.
Unfortunately, by letting MUNI get as bad as it has, SF has empowered the "cars at any cost" crowd. To people who absolutely have to drive (which, to be fair, includes a good number of elderly and disabled, but also a bunch of stubborn lazy types), 99.99% of the country is set up for you. Are you so short-sighted that you insist on turning the remaining 0.01%, one of our few remaining dense/ped-friendly cities, into car- and garage-dominated territory?
Is it still considered assault if you kill them? Or is it just murder? Because if they aren't doubling the punishment for murder it makes the choice much easier.
Who knew so many suburbanites read SFist?! Listen up you nasty foul suburbanites, you made the choice to live in your god awful out of the way place. San Franciscans are not going to pay the price of destroying our city so that you can have a giant paved lot to park in. It's just not in our interest dahlings.
Number 37: I'm not sure you know the definition of suburbanite. I hope you're not referring to the hardworking families in the "out of the way" sunset and richmond or the disenfranchised communities in the SE sector who also don't have alot of parking or even good access to the much maligned (and well deserved) muni system.
Sometimes I think the only true "suburbanites" in the City are the kids that grow up in the burbs--don't like it for a multitude of reasons, ample parking not one of them--and then bring their utopian ideology here. With a foul amount of arrogance, narrow-minded opinion and unfounded righteousness I might add number 37.
Now please go damage some more property to make a point. Better yet: protest a god awful supermarket from being built, dahling.
Dearest Suckafree, [17] [and all]
Careful how you vote this fall. The "parking for Neighborhoods" aka Fisher ordinance does sorta allow 1-1 parking. BUT the "Peskin" MTA one is a charter amendment which if passed overrules the Fisher one even if it passes, because that one is only an ordinance NOT a charter change.
The MTA one locks parking ratios to the way they were in 7/07 unless a 4/5 majority of the BOS approves any exception case by case. A 4/5 vote is nearly impossible to get and is rarely called for in other Board issues.
The clause was slipped in at the last minute.
SLIME SCUM politics at its worst.
Vote no on the MTA one, yes on the Parking one.
If confused, vote no on both if you want more parking.
I'll reply to flames later, after I get buzzed and bitchier.
Seriously: the only appeal of San Francisco is that it's like San Francisco is. There is nothing here that can't be gotten elsewhere, there are cooler cities, there are more affordable cities, there are cities with more opportunity. All San Francisco really has is its San Francisco-ness, and anyone who purports to like San Francisco would be wise to question the value of turning over its land to parking spaces. No, you can't have it both ways.
If you don't like San Francisco, then why do you want to bother to be able to park here? It's been said before: 99% of this country is built for you. Is it too much to ask for a single urban outpost on the west coast?
And #38, transit isn't utopian. Unworkable parking "solutions" might be, but transit isn't. Sure, ours sucks, but we'd fight a better fight to make it better, rather than sabotage it with this terrible measure.
Okay who are these people in the sunset that say its impossible to get anywhere on transit? I see all the little old ladies do it EVERY DAY! and does walking a few blocks kill you? i did it when i communted to the susnset for school. theres the 29, 71, 48 (which we should expand to be all the time not just school hours), L, J, 28, the sloat one, and a few others im forgeting. if you had more transit you wouldnt need a car! so go fight for more transit!!!
Does the tiny portion of SF population that does not (YET!) have cars get out of the city? How? On a friend's car? Because there are no other options, really.
(and if you don't, you're a moron who needs to open your mind to places outside your city block!)
Like myself (comment #8 is also mine), I'm sure most people who advocate more parking here ARE from the City. And hate the suburbs. AND HAVE A CAR.
I tell you about MUNI. I had to be in M.View at 8pm on a weekday a few days ago. I checked traffic reports at 6pm and saw a fatal accident on 101S that happened at 4:30; it would take over 1.5 hours to get to M.View according to 511.org (280 included.) I left my car at home and went to catch Geary-38 (at Masonic) to Caltrain (at 7:20.) A bus passed me on my way to the stop but I had almost an hour - plenty of time, right?! - so I didn't rush to catch it. Then I waited. And waited. And more people came. And waited. HALF AN HOUR LATER 3 BUSES CAME IN A ROW. They continued traveling in a row all the way downtown!! An off-duty MUNI driver sitting in front was talking to the driver about how the driver of the bus right in front (I took the 2nd one to speed things up) is doing everything wrong. There was NO reason for this other than MUNI OPERATOR INCOMPETENCE. NO double-parked cars or traffic incidents caused this. None.
I was 5 minutes late for my train. The next one was in over an hour. I paid $15 for a taxi back home, got in my car and drive to M.View. Almost an hour late.
F&*K MUNI.
even with all the rents and housing prices going up, it hasn't improved the sheer stupidity of some people in this town...yeah if you want to drive your retardo car all over and park in front of every single destination and not walk a block or 2, go to LA. Go to Seattle, go to the midwest, or go to hell. There's not enough room for every selfish "government owes me a living" republican in this town.
it's bad enough we got one as mayor who gives "I'm owed a job from the government" republicans to idiots like anne conroy, and now our city is infected....just because you are a republican with money does NOT mean the rest of us owe you more goodies. go back to texas if you don't like it, losers.
Guest #42, almost one third of San Francisco households do not own a car. That's not a tiny percentage.