Why We Love Garages Part 2 of 3

Aside from the difficulties finding a parking space that I discussed
in Part 1 of this diatribe, we San Franciscans have plenty to fear once we actually park.

San Francisco is infamous for its arbitrary restrictions: don’t park here for more than 2 hours Mon through Sat; don’t park here at all from 8am to 10am Wednesday; no Friday; no
12pm-2pm Thursday; no 12 midnight to 2am. These limits are ostensibly
set for myriad unproven reasons: street cleaning, to open parking or
neighborhood residents, to force drivers to purchase permits to park,
to fatten city coffers. I say unproven because any long time SF
citizen will attest that the street looks no cleaner after a
“cleaning,” and that the 2 hour limits do nothing to open more parking
for people who live in these ‘hoods, since people parked simply come
out, start their cars, move them back and forth to erase the chalk
mark the officer has left on the tire, and then re-park in the same
spot. The latter two reasons then are the ones we can all agree are
true; San Francisco collects millions of dollars in parking citation
revenue every year.

And no wonder. Signs like this are of little help to even the most
literate, law abiding driver. For instance, another obtuse favorite:
“No parking from 4 to 6pm on all days except Sundays and holidays.” But
whose holidays? We have thousands of religions and cultures here. Some
people boycott Columbus and celebrate Caesar Chavez. We have Easter,
Ramadan, Chanukah, Kwanza…I can’t even begin to list them all. We
have no way of knowing what the DPT considers a holiday and what is
does not.

Further arbitrary is the DO NOT BLOCK SIDEWALK edict. I myself have
suffered a citation for this, and $100 poorer, I sought to
understand. I was, in fact, parked in the driveway of my home. The
sidewalk, as far as I could tell, was still traversable behind my
modestly sized Beetle. So whom was I impeding? A person in a
wheelchair could have gotten by easily, but not, perhaps, two people
side by side in tandem wheelchairs. A parent pushing a stroller would
have breezed past, but not, maybe someone pushing quadruplets in a
horizontal line. I tried to tell this to the arbitration board when I
asked for my ticket to be reviewed, but no one can argue with the DPT;
fighting a ticket is a bigger waste of time than filling a bathtub
with an eye dropper. So I paid. But later I went so far as to flag
down one of the meter reader/ticket giver persons (whom you will spot
sporting helmets, and not because they might fall down, but because
everyone wants to hit them) to ask him: what exactly does it mean to
block a sidewalk? I pointed out two cars parked in their driveways,
with their tail ends extending past the driveways themselves: “Is that
blocking?

The helmeted man shrugged. “Not to me, but it depends on who is doing
the route. Another officer might ticket that.”

In other words, the DPT is proud of its contrary and impenetrable logic.

The point dear reader, is that paying extra for a garage at your home
is actually going to save you a lot of money, headache, and possibly
ulcers, in the end.