Is the City and County of San Francisco running an elaborate and lucrative grift?

If you live in Garbage City or are a recurring visitor and escape with your life, you know that the City has a Residential Parking Permit program whereby you (if you have a car) pay to park for more than two hours in your neighborhood. It’s currently $170 a year, which is actually pretty fucking cheap since, while you’re not guaranteed a spot at any given time, it’s still a lot less than a garage. It should probably be a lot more! But that’s not we’re here to talk about.

Your parking permit USED to be a sticker (this is called foreshadowing, it’s a sophisticated literary technique) that signified what neighborhood you were from. So I’ve been a North Beach A (twice), a Cole Valley J, and an Inner Richmond L. (Semi-humorously, I wrote a whole song (well, just the lyrics) on my old blog about it, called “I Thought She Was an I, But She Was Really a K.”) Some people would display all their stickers all over the back of their car like they were service ribbons from the Parking Wars which they basically were.

I was always a plasterer, which means I just slapped the new one on top of the old one and let them build up like the archaeological levels of an ancient city until it got to be too much and then I’d get a knife and peel the whole mess off.

What’s the grift, you might be asking yourself. I’m getting to that.

As explained in the Hoodline article linked in the caption, beginning in 2022 SFMTA stopped sending out stickers. What!?! How are they supposed to tell if you have a parking permit with no sticker? Easy, they tell us:

So futuristic! So advanced! I call bullshit.

I do so because SFMTA’s parking enforcement is so lax that they basically only do two things: street cleaning and meters (I know about the latter because I got a meter ticket like a week ago). They’re not enforcing any of the other shit like parking permits or the 72-hour rule (more on that in a minute). How do I know? I’ll give you an example. I know someone in my neighborhood who I specifically know does not have, and has never had, a parking permit. Does she get ticketed? Never.

This is a change! They used to ticket for this and just stopped. STRANGELY, this stop coincided with no more stickers. Think about it! Collect $170 from 70,000 car owners in San Francisco, make up some cockamamie bullshit about LPR or whatever and go get lunch. It’s brilliant in its simplicity. It’s like buying an ice cream cone and the ice cream person hands you nothing and you say “where’s my ice cream cone?” and she says “Oh we don’t actually provide real ice cream cones any more, but we have a sensor here behind the counter that tells us you have an ice cream cone and it’s delicious. Enjoy!”

Oh just to button this up with the 72-hour thing: SF has a rule on the books that you can’t park in the same spot for more than 72 hours. After that, you have to move your car. I have annoying neighbors who take the primo spots on our block and their cars just sit there until street cleaning every two weeks, when they pull around the corner until the street cleaning machine goes brrrrrrrrrrrr and then they pull back into their primo spots. I have no idea why they have these cars, because their only apparent use is to take up two parking spots. They never get ticketed either.

(For some reason, someone stole my last sticker right off my bumper a few weeks ago. It’s a 2022 so I don’t know what they thought they were accomplishing.)

(As if this post will ever end, this PS is about how I told my wife what this post would be about and she laughed and said “You have reached your final Dad form” but that’s not fair because I haven’t mentioned the Battle of Midway or the fact that the Visitor Center at the Antietam National Battlefield is closed for renovations right now so you should plan accordingly.)