An initiative bankrolled by the owner of a company that builds garages and a clothing chain tycoon looks headed for the November ballot. It calls for massive increases in commercial and residential parking, and housing advocates and transportation activists are up in arms. They say projects crafted through community-based planning would be gutted and pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users endangered.

Parking and conflict are no strangers. Last fall, a man was killed over a contested parking space in front of a club on Geary. More subtle battles are fought daily within the souls of individual drivers. The Glen Park Community Plan Summary, released in 2003, encapsulates this love-hate relationship:

“Parking is a subject of great interest and passion in Glen Park. Merchants want to ensure that their customers can easily find parking within walking distance of their businesses. Residents want available on-street parking near their houses. BART riders want both short- and long-term parking near the station. At the same time, nearly everyone wants to reduce the amount of traffic in the neighborhood.”

For parking to be easy, each car requires several spaces: home, work, store, etc. Few drivers consider the consequences, but Donald Shoup spells them out in The High Cost of Free Parking. “[P]andemic parking lots spread activities farther apart, making cars more necessary. Off-street parking requirements increase mobility by car, but they also reduce mobility by walking, cycling, and public transit.”

Adding residential garages does not actually increase capacity. Rather, it privatizes spaces by removing public curbside parking. Linda Ray, a public health nurse who has to drive throughout the City to visit patients in their homes, finds it harder to park on streets where every house has a driveway.

“Some streets have tiny spots between driveways that only motorcycles can fit in,” Ray said. “Most cars do not fit in those spaces. Making more curb cuts is a bad idea for people who have to drive and park in the City.”

The notion that more parking somehow reduces traffic assumes that cars in a lot magically parachute there from the sky instead of driving across pedestrian space. Parking is the solution only where no one walks. San Francisco is not Houston, and the parking initiative seeks to impose a Houston on a San Francisco.

Competing visions for the City face off on Mirabel Avenue in Bernal Heights. On one side, nearly every house has a garage and driveway. The other side has almost uninterrupted curbside parking. The driveway side has 14 trees and a few planter boxes, and cars are pulled up on the sidewalk. The nondriveway side has 28 trees and numerous planters along with benches, sculptures, and unobstructed pedestrian access.

Backers of the measure claim that lack of parking hurts poor and working families, but national statistics show that low-income families are much less likely to own cars and suffer most from disruptions to public transit. Besides losing bus stops to private garages, nonmotorists will wind up paying for their own marginalization.

As Shoup explains, “Off-street parking requirements will hide the cost of parking in the prices for everything else. They will collectivize the cost of parking, so everyone will pay for parking whether they use it or not.”

Housing advocates agree. They are alarmed at increased housing costs that will result from requirements that each residential unit have a dedicated parking space, whether the renter or owner moving in drives or not.

Shoup has crunched the numbers: “By increasing the cost of housing, parking requirements make the real homelessness problem even worse. People sleep in the streets, but cars park free in their ample off-street quarters. In city planning, free parking has become more important than affordable housing.”

Existing parking can be made much more efficient. In District 5, the Planning Commission has approved a proposal to make the DMV lot available for public parking on nights and weekends, rather than sitting empty much of the time. Such creative approaches have none of the consequences of the ballot measure.

“Greenwashing” means the process of cynically wrapping a polluting wolf in a green-looking sheepskin (think Chevron ads), and the parking initiative uses the concept of car sharing as its lamb. Because car sharing spaces are already exempt from parking totals in City planning code, the initiative’s claims that it will add such spaces are misleading. Anita Daley, membership development director of City CarShare, says they have worked hard to advance alternatives to driving, reduce car ownership, and encourage wise land use in the City, which sometimes includes less parking. She considers their cars an extension to public transportation.

Contact Fran Taylor at 415/947-6497 or ftaylor@cmp.com.

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