San Francisco news briefs

A fairer parking tax

In San Francisco nearly everyone who parks in a commercial garage pays a parking tax along with their parking fee. The parking tax is 25% of the parking fee and is distributed 40% to the general fund, 40% to Muni, and 20% to programs for seniors. The one exception is when companies lease or own parking and give free parking to (mostly upper-echelon) employees, who get free parking as a "perk" along with their high salaries. Since there's no fee, there's no tax. It's unfair that this one group of garage-parkers doesn't get to support city services and transit, and so the San Francisco Group urges the city to tax such spaces at a rate similar to charges on nearby commercial-garage monthly spaces.

What will we do when the oil runs low?

`Peak oil' is the concept that the volume of oil in newly discovered reserves around the world is less than the volume of oil being removed. This means that the annual supply of oil will soon peak and start to decrease. If the demand for oil does not also decrease, the price of oil will rise rapidly. The San Francisco Group urges San Francisco to study the impacts of peak oil on San Francisco: for example, on food distribution, transit, water, waste-handling economics, and emergency-response capability - and consider appropriate responses. The Local Agency Formation Commission, formed by the Board of Supervisors, will hold a hearing on this subject on Fri., July 28.

Keeping the park really open

For over 40 years the policy of opening part of John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park to pedestrians on Sundays - by keeping powered vehicles out - has been an outstanding success. The San Francisco Group is delighted with the possibility that the policy will be extended to Saturdays, but we are concerned about proposals to weaken the car-free policy on both days.

The purpose of the policy is to assure complete and free access to the park for everyone, including people with disabilities, but not for motor vehicles including buses or vans. Access needs to include sidewalk cut-throughs and more disabled parking outside the road-closure area.

Healthy Saturdays, as proposed, would have changed the policy for both Saturdays and Sundays to open part of Middle Drive near John F. Kennedy Drive for parking and to allow driving on JFK for people with disability placards. The mayor vetoed the proposal in May, claiming that disabled and museum access was insufficient.

The Sierra Club supports good access to the park for people with disabilities, but we do not believe that the Americans With Disabilities Act requires auto access everywhere that people can walk. In this case, it means good wheelchair access and appropriate provisions for people with other disabilities. In fact, driving on JFK would be of relatively little value because there are only about 150 parking spaces on JFK, spread over 1.5 miles and mostly not close to the museum, whereas there are 800 spaces in the new museum garage and over 3,000 in the rest of the park.

Decongesting downtown

San Francisco has a grant to study congestion charging for downtown. London already has such a system of charging 8 pounds per day (almost $16) to drive downtown. This has reduced driving by more than 15% and increased transit use and speed. The city uses video cameras to detect cars and charge them electronically. The San Francisco Group supports this study, though we note that the city's parking tax may already be accomplishing almost as much as congestion charges, and that one possibility is simply to raise the parking tax and improve the rules for it.

Get them before they're hot

The San Francisco Group is concerned about the few of the city's remaining precious natural areas that remain in private hands. The Recreation and Parks Department should use open-space funds to acquire these natural areas as quickly as possible, before land prices increase beyond available funding. These areas include Aqua Vista on Twin Peaks and Bay View Hill.

Three-quarters of a parking space is better than one

San Francisco is about (hopefully during June) to set a maximum of 0.75 parking spaces per housing unit in the South of Market area.

This will be a tremendous improvement over the current requirement for a minimum of one space per unit that still applies to the rest of the city - though the San Francisco Group for years had urged a maximum of just 0.25 spaces in downtown, and more recently we supported the Planning Department's proposal for a maximum of 0.5 spaces per unit. The department performed extensive studies to show that such a limit would work for SOMA without harm to the rest of the city. Developers, however, insisted that prospective apartment financiers and purchasers would demand more parking.

The legislation also requires all parking to be "unbundled", that is to be rented or sold separately from housing. Unbundling means that people who don't use parking won't have to pay for parking and thus effectively subsidize those who do.

The original legislation included a requirement to build most of the parking underground. This would allow for more commercial uses on the ground floors and lead to a more lively pedestrian ambiance. The mayor vetoed this requirement, probably because underground parking is more costly for developers, but he is expected to sign revised legislation.

Howard Strassner