How to Create 100,000 Parking Spots in San Francisco

We have also instituted policies to reduce housing (rent control), increase homelessness (city welfare programs & non-profits), reduce employment (anti-tech, heavy taxes, fees & regulations), increase cost and reduce quality of government services (lax management, union friendly contracts), increase corruption (single party rule), increase crime (lax prosecution, sanctuary), drive out families and middle class (high costs, poor schools)... I could go on all day.

I know this seems strange but you just don't understand. We are just much smarter, more sophisticated and more caring than you!

Sorry for the cynical, snide rant but sometime this city gets to me. It seems like a conspiracy to set SF up to fail but it is a conspiracy led by the people of SF. This is a great city but it could be so much better.

When we got to the Exploratorium on Embarcadero, I found several open street parking spaces in a row. I spent a few minutes looking all over to check for no parking signs or something to tell me I couldn't park there. I literally couldn't believe that there would be 6 open parking spaces in a row in S.F.

As I was there I was thinking... what in S.F. just banned cars all together? Instead, you could have tons of rental motorcycles and lots of trolley-type cars all over. S.F. just does not have space for hundreds of thousands of cars

A better solution would be to encourage the use of non-automobile transport through increased public transit investment (more service). That would free up plenty of parking for those who still choose to (or must) drive. Or to encourage ride or car-sharing, thus maximizing the effectiveness of existing parking (more people served per parked car). Also, raising the price of parking on-street would make more parking available, both by discouraging some existing parking and making off-street lots more profitable for operators.

I'm curious how you might solve the current problem?

What if there was a way to let people rent their driveways automatically for specific time periods during the day? Could even have some way for them to leave a set of keys with the driveway owner so they could move it in a pinch or something....

In SF, having a driveway with a bit of unusable space on one side gives you an extra parking space -- on the street. Blocking your own driveway there is legal. Even if you have room for your car(s) in a garage, I'd imagine an extra space is frequently useful in a city with such limited parking.

A bit of dead space also provides a buffer to turn into and out of the driveway that might sometimes be necessary (your turning radius isn't zero and some streets are narrow).

(Background: I lived in SF for 12 years but never owned a car or driveway there.)

Parking spots, including garages, will become much less valuable. There will be many other impacts much harder to foresee.

The space for traffic lanes would be a little smaller, and actually maneuvering in and out of parking spaces would be a pain in the ass from at least one lane.

The loss of some space for lanes could be addressed by angle parking instead of parallel parking. If the angle is not too steep (say, 30 degrees or less), it would not unduly interfere with people using their driveways even if both sides of the driveway were occupied by parked cards.

Both the lane width problem and the maneuvering problem could be addressed if the street was changed to a one-way street.

(Hmmm...converting a street to one-way and reducing the number of lanes by one could give enough space to do angle parking on BOTH sides. That would give a big parking gain).

However, if you're forced to drive and park in SF, what's extra frustrating about the wasteful driveway situation is that a good percentage of the garages are not even being used for cars. Many have been converted into bedrooms or storage. I wish there someway to identify such conversions and allow parking in their driveways.

But these wasted spaces the author talks about are areas where a car should be able to park nicely without hitting anyone. But because of a driveway/bad planning the car either has to be small enough or have a driver that is really good at parallel parking to fit into it. So even his suggestion is enacted, it wouldn't actually increase the number of parking spots, it would just make some of the current difficult ones easier to slide into. My apartment complex has two garages with driveways about 2 cars apart. Every morning when I walk out I either see one very large truck there or two cars that are nearly touching.

All that wasted time by the driver to make sure he was outside of the driveway and not hitting the car in front/behind him, or the extra time the car that could have parked behind the large truck. That time adds up for everyone.

b) Parking is a problem mainly in dense urbanized areas like commercial districts. In residential areas like the Sunset or Richmond district, there's already plenty of parking, and that's where the bulk of the gains from this suggestion would be realized - which is no help if you're trying to park in the Mission or Upper Haight.

c) Good luck finding the money to pay for altering the front yards of many houses; even assuming automatic agreement from the residents, they have no particular reason to spend the money to implement this scheme so the city would have to pick up the cost.

I think the best solution tot he problem of parking in SF is more smartcars (as there are many 1 and 2 person households that just need a runaround vehicle), more zipcars, more rideshares, and eventually driverless cars. SF can be a hard city to get around at times and bicycles or public transit are impractical for many purposes, but the root of the parking problem is too many idle vehicles.

In my fantasy world, curb cuts would be taxed. Many of the private home garages could be converted back into housing as it was before (and without raising the precious height of a building!) and increase the capacity of the city.

However, as others have noted San Francisco does not need more parking. It needs fewer cars. San Francisco actually has more cars per capita than any other city in america (source: Street Fight http://www.amazon.com/Street-Fight-Politics-Mobility-Francis...). Parking should cost money to discourage cars, improve efficiency, and generate revenue.

The author even comes out and says that there is no way this could happen as you can't really up and move every existing driveway.