Why drivers risk tickets instead of parking in their garages | Hacker News Reader

Why drivers risk tickets instead of parking in their garages

sfstandard.com

24 pointsmikhael49 comments

If the garage is too small because the house is so old, I can almost understand. But if it’s because you have too much shit and you stuffed it in your garage, screw you, enjoy your tickets.

Even some newer houses have garage space issues.

Mine was built in the mid-2000s, and thanks to the way the face furnace+AC unit is installed, 14.5’ is the longest car that can be parked in it, and even that’s not ideal because it leaves no space to move around. At least a foot shorter is better and two feet shorter would be ideal, but that eliminates the majority of what’s being sold in the US today.

I don’t yet have a car but will be needing one soon, and it’s a real pain, especially since I’d prefer an EV which further cuts down options.

> I don’t yet have a car but will be needing one soon, and it’s a real pain, especially since I’d prefer an EV which further cuts down options.

Look into the Fiat 500e, at least here in Europe it's reasonably popular and should have ample space left in your garage. Pretty decent to drive as well.

It’s on my radar for sure.

Most older houses have/had large garages however some houses had garage spaces converted into living space.

Only $108 per ticket seems low to me. Depending on how often they write tickets it may still be worth it for residents to park on the sidewalk:

If monthly rent in SF is between $4.63 and $5.35/sqft[1] then the value of an additional ~130sqft[2] room would be at least $600/month. An unfinished garage space is probably a little less so let's say the value of a garage is $500/month. As long as you get four or fewer tickets per month then it's still cost-effective to continue to park your private vehicle in the public right-of-way and continue to use your garage for an office, gym, storage, other car, etc.

Something similar happened in NYC. Renting a garage became more expensive than just paying a couple street sweeping tickets a week so many people started keeping their car on the street and treating the tickets as a parking fee.

[1] https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/san-francisco-ca [2] https://www.dimensions.com/element/parking-spaces

Basically, being rich means entering a more entitled tax bracket where laws are just the cost of living.

This is basically how I handle it, and we live in the neighborhood mentioned by this article. The disability claim is largely a straw man argument: I've never seen someone in a wheelchair try to navigate SF streets - they're far, far too hilly and para-transport exists. This whole thing comes down to SFMTA being a bunch of crash-grabbing motherfuckers. The amount of revenue the city takes in through ticketing is outrageous, to the point that it's less and less about bylaw enforcement and more about making money.

I think last year my total $-amount for SFMTA tickets came to ~$1300? Still cheaper than paying for a garage or wasting my time trying to find street parking.

More on context here: the sidewalks of the outer sunset and outer richmond are extremely wide, to the point were you could easily parallel park 1.5 cars right on the sidewalk, so it's trivial to park a car such that it being partially in the driveway will leave more than enough space for anyone to pass.

> The amount of revenue the city takes in through ticketing is outrageous, to the point that it's less and less about bylaw enforcement and more about making money.

Be that as it may, a society that allows individuals to claim public land for private use without any compensation or penalty also seems outrageous.

I can't speak to SF and personally I'd look the other way if someone is taking less than a couple feet from a sufficiently wide sidewalk in front of their house. But at least in NYC many sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes, car lanes, and bus lanes are impassable because the cost of parking there is far too low.

> Be that as it may, a society that allows individuals to claim public land for private use without any compensation or penalty also seems outrageous.

SF is rife with that and the SF Coalition on Homelessness makes its money on that premise.

SF needs to be ticketing sidewalk parkers while INCREASING the availability of parking in business districts. Right now what we have is just anti-car tyranny.

Why should the city provide subsidized parking at all? Car owners should pay the full cost (or the businesses that want to attract them should).

As someone who grew up in the outer sunset where this is also a frequent occurrence, it's surprising to me how so many people engage in such anti social behavior and don't see a problem with it.

If $1300 per year in SFMTA tickets isn't enough to dissuade you, I can only hope that the violations are increased substantially. I wish we would follow the Nordic model of fines being scaled to income.

You really think that's anti-social behaviour? It's a matter of practicality, my delicate flower.

If they are treating it as a cost, an escalating fee schedule might be a good approach. 1x the first ticket, 2x for the second one within 12 months of the first, 4x for the next one within 12 months of the second.

Doesn't hit accidental offenders too hard, but hits the scofflaws pretty good.

If we were serious about curbing this violations would either be points deducted on your licence or criminal charges

I'm not surprised cities are trying to claw back revenue because car infrastructure and its side effects like enabling massive sprawl are so astonishingly high

Drivers don't even know those costs, consider the roads you have now, they're in the state they are despite absolutely huge political support

"Phenomenon"? Like drivers haven't been doing this everywhere since the introduction of both cars and sidewalks?

If anything, workshops have been part of home designs since time immemorial. I consider my "garage" to be fundamental to my home ownership - it's a space dedicated to repair, cleaning, crafting, and maintenance projects. The idea that you are supposed to give up an entire room of your house just to park a car is weird to me.

This would not be an enforceable problem anywhere I have lived. This seems like a symptom of underlying overcrowding issues specific to this area rather than some sort of criminal phenomenon. If these areas have way more cars than parking spots, that strikes me as a failure of zoning - too many tenants and not enough transit for the style of neighborhood.

> The idea that you are supposed to give up an entire room of your house just to park a car is weird to me.

Keeping one's possessions on one's own property, I mean can you imagine? I have to give up an entire room in my house to park my washer and dryer, another to park my desk and chair for my home office, another to park my bed...where does it end? It's completely ridiculous. /s

The idea that the public should give someone land to park their car round-the-clock is equally weird. If the car owner is paying, it's a different story of course.

I do agree with you that the number of cars illegally parked in a neighborhood is a reflection on the quality and frequency of public transit.

> She said she started parking in her client’s driveway after her car was broken into twice on city streets.

And just a day ago someone in another thread asked me where I (as an European) get my negative opinions on the state of security in major US cities.

In like 20 years I only heard of one person who got their car broken into here in Munich. Here is one person to whom it happened twice. Serious question, WTF is going on with your politicians, why is this so seemingly accepted that people go out of their way to avoid danger?

I'd consider trading in my car for a shorter one that does fit in the limited space, since I'm not married to it.

I had a problem with a neighbor who would constantly park over the sidewalk and block it completely.

I knocked on his door and politely asked him to stop. He reacted in the worse way possible and tried to intimidate me while never opening his storm door. This caused me to laugh and it made him even more angry.

He refused to move the truck and my wife and I refused to push our child’s stroller into the street. So I called our city’s police non emergency number.

I thought the city would send out an officer to speak to the guy. Nope. They just sent a tow truck and towed it without even knocking on the guy’s door.

I had that guy’s truck towed four times in less than two months.

He made multiple posts on Nextdoor and to my surprise many individuals came to his defense and supported him parking on the sidewalk.

> He made multiple posts on Nextdoor and to my surprise many individuals came to his defense and supported him parking on the sidewalk.

Similar experience with local Facebook. People truly don't understand why anyone would be upset with someone parking their car in a sidewalk.

A similar incident was the main reason I canceled all of my social media altogether.

There is a stop sign directly in front of my house. Children routinely play in the street. People were running the stop sign all day everyday. Not just rolling through it, but going through it so fast that they were ending up on the opposite side of the road and had to correct themselves to get into the proper lane.

My wife and I spent months calling and emailing the police department. I even setup a cheap Wyze camera attached to our mailbox and sent videos to the police department. They never did anything.

I finally made a post on Nextdoor and it caused a huge mess. People were so offended that we expected them to simply stop at the sign and drive at a reasonable speed. It really caused me to no longer want to be involved in any of the community stuff in our town.

Nextdoor and Ring neighborhoods can be really awful. Surprisingly the best experiences for me have been in my neighborhood’s Facebook group.

I'm proud of you for doing the right thing. I would have just started throwing bricks in the road.

That sounds exactly like 9/10 sidewalk parkers that I approach.

Their attitude is always that their private vehicle has the right to be stored on public property for free.

Sounds about right.

I don't understand this problem. The sidewalk is city property. You cannot block it. Lose the big car or park it in the street. EV charging is not a hardship excuse.

> The sidewalk is city property.

This isn't always so cut and dry. In some older neighborhoods, the homes predate the sidewalks, sometimes by up to a hundred years!

So as part of the agreement, the city might maintain rights of the easement for the sidewalk, but the homes/streets/driveways were never designed with a sidewalk bisecting them.

Any easement agreement does not supersede the law. Blocking the sidewalk is against the law.

The easement is the public property, in that case. Blocking it is intruding on public property one way or the other.

> Teisi commutes from the East Bay to San Francisco to work as a caregiver. She said she started parking in her client’s driveway after her car was broken into twice on city streets.

I don't really get this argument. This feels like it might be an improvised excuse. If you're going to break into a car, I think you'd be no less likely to do it on the street as you would 5 feet away, on the sidewalk.

If it's street parking, you might be stuck with a parking spot a block away or more.

I grant that there's a world where, because the vehicle is parked on the sidewalk in front of the house, this caregiver can watch it like a hawk while also doing their job, and the would-be burglar knows they are watching, and so does not break into their car. It does not seem likely to me, but it's possible—maybe this is why only one person gave this safety excuse for parking on the sidewalk.

This is really frustrating and I would argue feeds into a lot of accessibility issues even outside the more salient points surrounding the handicapped.

The fact that vehicles have grown so large that on-street parking has become virtually necessary is a frustration I've had to deal with frequently as a driver, pedestrian, and cyclist, moreover, just using the street for recreation has become more hazardous. It's even more frustrating when it's done for the sake of convenience. Trebly so when some dickhead parks their RV in the road at an intersection which forces everyone to, quite literally, pull into the lane to see if there's oncoming traffic. And I'm still waiting to get doored while cycling by some dipshit parked on-street for their half-mile unburdened commute since despite the very evident easy-reasonable-good use for our 4mi² town bike lanes are actually just parking.

All of this makes roadfaring in any capacity unnecessarily obnoxious, and I would say it's a glaring oversight which has many, many invisible downstream costs.

We need to ticket all of these people, and tax city car use on an income based scale. It should cost you an enormous amount of money to have a car in the city. Car ownership is antisocial, if the government was doing it's job it would he heavily disincentivized.

Your cited reason is because it’s antisocial? That isn’t something that is under a sane government’s purview to regulate.

If you want to build a case against car ownership or pervasive car ownership, there are better foundations on which to build that argument.

I think you're confused, I'm not using the "doesn't want to talk to people" definition of antisocial, I'm using it as the antonym of prosocial.

If the government was doing its job, the alternatives would be so good that people wouldn't want a car because they didn't feel like they needed one.

Unfortunately, bans and disincentives are easier so most cities (especially with left-leaning politicians) take the easy route...

Not in SF (or even the USA), but the size of the vehicle, and whether it would fit down the driveway and into the garage of my parent's 1970s house was one of the two deciding factors in buying a BYD Dolphin (the other was price of course, which was somewhat flexible, unlike the width of the driveway/garage). The width requirement severely limited their options.

Car manufacturers need to make the cars we want, and stop whinging about needing protection from Chinese automakers.

> "Why are these garages so small?"

A better question may be, "why is your car so big?"

tl;dr - cars are too big and people don’t realize how big a hardship overhanging the sidewalk imposes on the handicapped.

And assume their convenience is more important than any imposition they place on others

People need to accept the legitimacy of government and laws, especially local where you have the most direct representation and influence.

Stop complaining. Either change the rules or shut up.

If everyone on SF hates these rules they will be easy to change.

> hardship overhanging the sidewalk imposes on the handicapped

Some of the neighborhoods in question are in off the path areas and on steep grades. I wonder how much this is a legitimate problem or a "gotcha" justification.

Not just handicapped - accessibility features help the able as well. Someone pushing a child stroller, or a grocery trolley. A child on a bike. An adult carrying something heavy.

When people park in such a way as to block the sidewalk, I walk around their car through their yard. If they can help themselves to the sidewalk, I can help myself to their lawn.

It has zero to do with that; A bulk of SF was built when cars were enormous. The people parking ON the sidewalk do it because they either don't care, already have a car in their garage or street parking is taken up by people who have 12 people living in their house with 16 cars on the street.

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