This one seems obvious, but SFMTA’s proposal to implement parking meters active until 10pm is regressive policy that hurts many constituents and particularly our restaurants, bars, and event venues. Let’s go through the myriad ways this is bad policy.

• Restaurants and bars have less demand because people who drive are deterred from either coming into the city or visiting establishments outside their neighborhood.
• Workers at restaurants, bars and event venues or need to drive to work are forced to watch their meters, ask to take breaks to feed them thereby risking degraded customer service, and also pay a meter up to $25 a shift when minimum wage is $18/hour. And imagine getting a $95 ticket because you were working too hard?
• People living in commercial districts with cars, largely young people who rent and don’t have garages, get a regressive tax on them that’s really bad if they’re feeding their meters and downright awful if they’re getting multiple tickets a month.

MTA has long been terrible managing its finances and has long vilified automobiles. We also understand that the policy of not enforcing fare violations on public transit has caused a self-imposed budget crunch. There are better ways to balance the MTA budget and increase paid ridership on public transit and decrease cars.

The proposal seems to have been put on hold, but not killed outright, thanks to a few level-headed supervisors. We need to keep this on the radar to make sure it doesn’t slip through any cracks and get implemented.

Thanks to the GGRA for aggressively fighting this when it was first announced.