Local parking permits -- and fees

08.13.12 - 2:57 pm | Tim Redmond |

(69)

SF Newspaper Company photo

So the city's going to take a look at the neighborhood parking program. Good. Here's my first question: Why do the car owners get away so cheap?

It costs $64 a month to buy a Muni Fast Pass. It costs at least $300 a month to rent a garage. But if you're in the neighborhood parking program, you get essentially a guaranteed parking space on a city street -- public property -- for $104 a YEAR, or about 28 cents a day.

That's crazy.

I'm not for eliminating the neighborhood parking stickers; the program keeps out-of-town commuters from driving into SF and using residential areas as free parking lots. But let's make the car owners -- who, by the way, are still reaping the Schwarzenegger VLF windfall -- pay their fair share.

Double the fee and you get another $6.5 million. And the parking permits would still be the bargain of the decade.

And then maybe we can get God out of the parking system.

Comments

Guaranteed a parking spot?

Guaranteed a parking spot? What San Francisco do you live in? The neighborhood pass allows you to park in an houred parking spot and only have to move you car for weekly street sweeping. It does not "guarantee" you a parking spot. Sometimes you get a spot - sometimes you dont. Also I noticed that you pointed out - we are parking on public property. Did you know there are streets in the city without the time limits that let anybody park there free of charge!!! Oh the humanity!!!

All sarcasm aside - if your argument is that MUNI prices are too high I agree with you. MUNI has decided to continually fleece the lowest earners in San Francisco because they are unable to run a profitable (or break-even) system. This is mostly due to incompetence and over paying executives IMO. However, to compare how overpriced MUNI is with what you feel is "the deal of the century" is absurd. The face that MUNI is overpriced for residents who are using it to work and then paying taxes that further fund MUNI does not mean that street parking should cost 500 bucks a year. The idea that since one service is overpriced that we should overprice the rest is ignorant.

Posted by Guest on Aug. 14, 2012 @ 9:13 am

Point is that $104 us just for a right to look for a

parking spot that might not even exist. So it's a fair price.

Muni is too expensive for what it is but cutting fares will just increase demand which will slow it down even more. Muni fails because of its cost burden - muni drivers get paid twice what private bus drivers make - that cannpt be ustified.

Posted by lillipublicans© on Aug. 14, 2012 @ 11:03 am

A fast pass costs $74/mo for

A fast pass costs $74/mo for the right to look for a bus that might not even exist. The cost of a NPP should cost the same as a fast pass but it cannot because state law prohibits that unless it is passed by the voters.

Posted by marcos on Aug. 14, 2012 @ 11:41 am

Take it to the state

The Residential Parking Permits are based on state statutes as Marcos said.

Posted by Guest: on Aug. 14, 2012 @ 11:59 am

This is slightly off-topic,

This is slightly off-topic, but since this thread is partially about Muni, check this out:

Commissioner: Join us in condemning ads that are hate speech and promote violence

http://www.change.org/petitions/commissioner-join-us-in-condemning-ads-t...

Posted by Guest on Aug. 14, 2012 @ 5:24 pm

promoted by Gabs Halaand

????

The thing is, I don;t like Israel all that much, but the complainers equate being a Muslim with Jihad.

One of those times where both sides are lame. Complaining about the ad's in this context makes the complainer just as silly.

Posted by matlock on Aug. 14, 2012 @ 7:09 pm

Can't eat out unless you eat at home.

Haaland should restrict his activism to what he's paid to do--keep the economic circumstances of SEIU members from deteriorating as has happened every year for the past decade since he's worked at SEIU by addressing the common threats to both organized and unorganized working folks. If he cannot arrest labor's free fall, he should seek employment elsewhere and give someone else a crack. Otherwise, we can expect more of the same.

But there always seems to be some minor aspect of identity politics providing a convenient distraction from dealing with the big ticket items. Thus, we all always fall further behind while the loud mouths are seen as appearing to care for "the most vulnerable" under this model of activism. In this case it is not even action involved, it is speech, and there is not even an effort to change circumstances on the ground.

Perish the thought that any Democrat Party or labor activists will take steps to prevent the brutal, violent and patently illegal actual real physical oppression of Palestinians by Israeli apartheid using our tax dollars. That is too divisive and actually risks changing real conditions for real people on the ground. Contrast this to 30 years ago, there were currents in labor and the Democrat Party that stood up to free South Africa.

To my mind, any monotheist is a "savage," especially those who have to wear special clothes at the behest of their god--Orthodox Jews, fundie sect Christians, Mennonites, Amish, Catholic Priests and Nuns, Mormons with their magic underwear and, yes Muslims with their religious garb.

The basis for this is if they will wear special clothing in service of a common delusion, what else would they do? The historical record of what they have done is clear and it is brutal. The criminal history of monotheism is written for five centuries in the blood of the nonbelievers.

Posted by marcos on Aug. 16, 2012 @ 5:58 am

MUNI is a government agency, required under the 1st

amendment to take the ads. It can't pick or chose, nor should it, which position is politically acceptable and which is not. Remember - the Constitution only applies to government, not to private business and as long as MUNI is a government agency it's going to have to display ads which some percentage of people are going to disagree with.

Posted by Troll II on Aug. 14, 2012 @ 8:04 pm

Government agencies have

Government agencies have standards for the advertising they will accept that has nothing to do with the first amendment where government cannot exercise prior restraint on private acts of speech. Government can decide the terms of speech when private entities purchase advertising rights from the government.

That said, I think that the content of the speech is repugnant in its intent, but it is much more representative of an increasingly marginalized and illegitimate zionism than it does damage to anyone. It is the Israelis who are "savages," and savage is only a bad thing if you view western "civilization" as somehow superior to non-western and/or non-civilization, the savages.

We are beyond the point of political discussion having devolved into the realm of the hurt feelings of progressive activists. The prime determinant of political action is how does anything effect activist sensibilities more than what does this mean to real people in the real world. It reflects the disconnect of the leftist as acting putatively for the people, but with a distrust bordering on contempt for the lumpen.

Yes, this is gross, but hiding gross does not make it go away.

Posted by marcos on Aug. 15, 2012 @ 6:07 am

MUNI took the ad after another transit agency was ordered

by a federal judge to display the ads after they had refuse to do so. There's no reason to think that had MUNI made the decision New York City made and refused to run these ads that a federal judge in California would have reacted any differently than the one did in New York.

Listen - I don't like Pamela Geller, the extremist who's pushing these ads, at all. But MUNI can't refuse political ads because it disagrees with them. That's the end of the story. Frankly I'm glad MUNI is running them and didn't waste another $500,000 - $1,000,0000 bucks on a futile legal campaign, only to be ordered in the end to pay the plaintiff's legal costs and run them anyway.

Posted by Troll II on Aug. 15, 2012 @ 10:37 am

That bus ad is appalling.

And of course it reminds me of the immediate pretext under which I was banned from commenting on that bastion of right-wing puffery, SFGate.

In response to the comment "All Arabs are terrorists" -- which I reported as hate speech, but which remained nonthelesss -- I wrote "All Jews are terrorists" -- while expressly stating that I was being facetious.

Yes, this bus advertisement is hate speech because it ineluctibly brands all non-Jews fighting against Israeli attacks on Arab sovereignty as "savages"; it says all Arabs are savages.

While -- contrary to the idiot pablum offered by my golem here -- transit agencies certainly *do* have the right to regulate what advertisments they take, my objection to ads is that they appear on buses *at* *all.*

Perhaps someone can enlighten me to the contrary, but it seems that the costs in terms of cheapening the environment and degrading the very service mass transit is there to provide, the ads can't possibly be worthwhile.

I'm thinking in particular of the buses with wrap-around graphics which make it difficult or impossible to recognize them as buses -- or for passengers inside them to see clearly where they are.

Also I thinking of what I felt was a particularly galling campaign by the banksters at Citi bank some years ago which read "in your dreams, this is a limosine." Really? I get to ride in a conveyance which contains an insulting impertinence against me on the outside?

I have fredom of speech too -- and I think that means I get to *not* *speak*; I should be able to have my conveyance *not* carry an advertisement on it which I do not support.

______________________________________________________
http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2012/08/03/supervisors-prepare-receive-mirk...
lillipublicans©, often impostered, less frequently equaled.

Posted by lillipublicans© on Aug. 15, 2012 @ 6:51 am

It is appalling, but...

I had started to sign the petition, but then I had second thoughts and erased my name. Look, I'm no Zionist. Let's put it this way -I participate in the BDS movement. But the ACLU progressive in me doesn't want to limit anyone's speech. And yes, it IS hate speech. But you know, I never really felt comfortable with hate speech laws. That's one place where I differ from many liberals. I don't think we get to pick and choose which speech we allow, *even* if it's horribly repugnant and offensive. No, *especially* if it's horribly repugnant and offensive. The first amendment has no meaning if it only protects non-offensive speech.

It's one thing to do something like boycott Rush Limbaugh's advertisers. You're just saying, "Fine, you have the right to support hate, but then we have the right not to buy products and services from people who support hate." Or for example, setting limits on campaign spending, so that one side can't monopolize the debate and thus drown out the other side's message. But censoring ads for content... I think that crosses a line.

Maybe MUNI shouldn't allow advertising at all. Should every square inch of our public spaces be commercialized and sold off to the highest bidder? That's a legitimate debate to have. But once you open the door to this kind of thing, I think they have to allow any group on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Posted by Greg on Aug. 15, 2012 @ 7:37 am

If you stipulate that the proper recourse is a boycott,

and since obviously there is no way to boycott a hate group, doesn't imply that one would boycott the venue for the ads?

An analogy would be a station running hate speech advertisments from -- say white/Christian supremacists -- and we'd boycott the station totally.

But in the case of the public transit agency, those are *our* buses subsidized at public expense for our conveyance. We can't boycott them except at real cost to ourselves.

No, I think logic dictates that we ban advertisements on buses -- at least whenever complaints are issued.

With regard to the present real-world situation, I think research will bear out that the censorship that is done in these cases *favors* the "majority" viewpoint (i.e. radical zionists and other religionists of all flavors) at the expense of progressive ideals and the viewpoints of minority thinkers.

And if ads are "sold to the highest bidder," then in the real world freedom of speech is not free at all. This is a basic inconsistency with our political system wherein money controlls whose speech is heard.
______________________________________________________
http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2012/08/03/supervisors-prepare-receive-mirk...
lillipublicans©, often impostered, less frequently equaled.

Posted by lillipublicans© on Aug. 15, 2012 @ 9:27 am

*One* possible recourse, not *the* proper recourse

Another is to simply reserve advertising space for a competing message. I still believe the best defense against hate speech, is more/different speech.

But there are a couple of points where I think you're not understanding my meaning, or perhaps I didn't make myself as clear as I should have.

One is the nature of the boycott I'm talking about. I'm talking about a boycott of an entity that *chooses* to associate itself with hate, such as an advertiser that chooses to advertise on Limbaugh. It's quite a different thing for an entity to have a blanket policy that *anyone* can post an ad regardless of content, and they will not control that content in any way. In the latter case, the entity that allows itself to be used as a billboard isn't consciously choosing to associate itself with hate.

I probably also should have used a different phrase than "sold to the highest bidder," because if that's indeed the case, then you're right, it's not free speech but money controlling speech. If, on the other hand, it's a matter of having a set (affordable) rate, and then any group being able to reserve the space on a first-come, first-serve basis, that's a different story. Of course you get into the question of what is affordable. There's no rate that's affordable to every single person/group. So maybe it's best that this kind of thing not be allowed period.

But then consider what happens in that case. All advertising is then in the hands of private corporations, and they censor whatever the hell they please. Just one example I know of -there was an enviromental group that tried to buy ad space for an anti-oil company ad that mocked the company's greenwashing slogans, in the vein of "Do people pollute the environment and then greenwash their image? People do." They had the money, they tried to get the space, but you know what? None of the corporate-owned TV stations would sell them the space! How's that for class solidarity? So where are you going to see that message, if not on a publicly-owned medium?

As for the present, real-world situation, I can tell you this isn't the first controversy about MUNI bus ads. But the previous ones were cases where the right wing was pissed. One was an ad *for* Islam, and the anti-Islam hate groups were going berzerk about it. Another was an atheist ad mocking all religious idiocy. The difference was that neither was hate speech, but hate speech is really in the eye of the beholder.

Ideally, I'd really like to see less advertisements and more public access TV, where anyone can sign up and they don't have to pay. It would be much better if we had a mixture of privately-owned, government-funded, and cooperatively owned media, and strong regulations that prevented any one entity from getting too big. Unfortunately, that's not the media model this country operates under.

In the meantime, do we really want to take away one of the few places where a group can actually reserve a space, and mock Chevron's greenwashing slogans, or denounce the common idiocy of Christians, Muslims, and Jews all hating each other because they disagree on whose fake god myth is better? I dunno... maybe. I wouldn't be too upset if MUNI decided that their busses couldn't act as moving billboards anymore. But then again, I kind of like the feisty ads mixing it up, as long as everybody gets a chance to do it.

Posted by Greg on Aug. 15, 2012 @ 10:20 am

*One* possible recourse, not *the* proper recourse

Another is to simply reserve advertising space for a competing message. I still believe the best defense against hate speech, is more/different speech.

But there are a couple of points where I think you're not understanding my meaning, or perhaps I didn't make myself as clear as I should have.

Posted by Greg on Aug. 15, 2012 @ 10:23 am

Parking

The neighborhood parking sticker is more of a regressive tax than your editorial implies. It is not requested by "a majority of property owners" but residents of a particular block. Many, if not most, property owners have garages and do not have to worry about the fees at all. My block recently succumbed to permit parking due to the domino effect. It expand block-by-block away from a commercial street. The result is that street parking becomes just as difficult as before, and us renters are stuck with an ever-increasing fee, whether or not we voted for it (I didn't).

Posted by Marc Gardner on Aug. 16, 2012 @ 8:24 am

I don't see what the

I don't see what the commotion is all about. The fees is put in place so as to provide parking space for car owners who live around the vicinity and yes, to reduce outside drivers from driving into SF and parking for free while depriving nearby residents of their deserved space. I most certainly don't see the reason why the fees need to be increased. In fact, there shouldn't even be a fee imposed since the residents should automatically be awarded those spaces for staying there. Instead, the outside commuters should be made to pay if they wish to park there before going onto transit.

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