SAN FRANCISCO – With tough questions being asked at City Hall over why San Francisco's parking meters aren't generating more revenue, one possible explanation beginning to emerge is the astonishingly high number of disability placards that have been handed out in the city.
San Francisco has about 23,000 coin-fed parking meters, while city residents hold about 90,000 permanent and temporary disability parking placards, which are issued by the state Department of Motor Vehicles, allowing them to park free, said Judson True, spokesman for the city's Municipal Transportation Agency.
That's about four placards for every meter.
“While the MTA supports the legitimate use of disability placards, there is no doubt that they have an effect on our parking-meter revenue,” True said.
Tim Hornbeck is executive director of The Arc of San Francisco, a nonprofit group that helps and advocates for people with disabilities. He agreed that better enforcement of disability placards by the DMV may be needed. But so is parking-meter enforcement, he said.
“I just walked outside of our building,” Hornbeck said. “Out of 27 meters, nine were expired with no tickets, five had disability placards and one was a city vehicle. Only 12 of those meters were getting revenue.”
To obtain a disability placard, California residents must have certain medical conditions and have them certified by a doctor or other medical professional.
The uproar over a report revealing that the city's meters are taking in a citywide average of 22 percent of their potential revenue showed no signs of abating. Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, who has waged an often lonely campaign for parking reform in the city, suddenly found himself in the spotlight, spending much of the day delivering on-camera interviews.
“Let's clean this act up,” McGoldrick said, adding that doubling the meter collection could provide an extra $30 million for the San Francisco Municipal Railway.
Last year, the city collected about $29 million from meters that yielded on average $4.07 per day. City officials are at a loss to explain the relatively low average take, particularly from downtown meters that cost motorists as much as $3 an hour.
In the city's downtown core, where meters are the most expensive, they pull in just $2.61 on average per day. Outside downtown, in commercial areas and at tourist-heavy Fisherman's Wharf, the average daily collections are $4.41 and $5.59, respectively. Off-street meters in garages took in an average of $4.55 a day. There are about 373,000 registered cars in the city.
Those numbers are raising eyebrows because they mean that in a city where competition for street parking is sharp, meters downtown collected less than one hour's worth of revenue a day.
Agency officials say they don't believe its employees – or anyone else – are stealing meter revenue, as was the case in the 1990s, saying new collection and banking procedures make large-scale theft unlikely.
Aside from the high number of disability placards, agency officials blame the low collection rate on such factors as commercial loading zones and parking reserved for construction.
Donald Shoup, a University of California Los Angeles professor who has studied the issue, said sharp increases in parking-meter rates, such as those imposed in San Francisco, can have the effect of driving motorists into private garages.
