Aparkalypse Now

Employers don't seem to care. The whole of the city's southern side, a warehouse district just months ago, is suddenly becoming a vast urban village. Around 3 million square feet of new commercial space is proposed for these parts, with much more to come.

Worse, some South of Market parking spaces will be temporarily lost while the Bay Bridge receives an earthquake retrofit. Around 4,000 parking spaces will be cordoned off, a couple hundred at a time, as Caltrans undertakes the massive job. Even more parking will be lost as office buildings fill empty SOMA lots created when the freeway ramps connecting the Bay Bridge to the old Embarcadero Freeway were torn down.

At Mission Bay, a 303-acre development to be built south of the new ballpark along the flanks of the China Basin Channel, the Catellus Corp. plans 6,000 new apartments, 1.5 million square feet of retail space, a new UCSF campus, and a 5 million-square-foot campus of biotech office buildings.

With fewer and fewer parking spaces for more and more workers, South of Market is on the brink of a parking meltdown.

So upset are San Francisco building owners that they recently held a luncheon to discuss the PARKING EMERGENCY, and berate city officials for ignoring their cries for relief. Building owners want 10,000 new parking spaces, and they want them NOW.

"As development continues, cars are going to come in. It can't be stopped," says David Collins, vice president of Ampco Parking and a director of the Building Owners and Managers Association. "Without places for the cars to park, we're going to have increased congestion and a strangling of the growth."

Marc Intermaggio, BOMA's executive vice president, believes that "unless the city allows the construction of more new parking lots, we will lose jobs to places where people can access them better."

Even the San Francisco Chronicle has joined in the hand-wringing, with news stories, and columnist Ken Garcia, beating the drum for more parking.

Without more parking, these doomsayers argue, the glow will fade from San Francisco's once-beautiful shores. Technology companies will flee for plentiful parking beyond. Economic recession? No more dot-com boom? San Francisco a no-parking ghost town?

When thus adrift, San Francisco often turns its lonely eyes eastward, toward the offices of Allan Jacobs, the guru, the all-knowing-all-being-master, of San Francisco planning. Director of city planning from 1967 through 1974, Jacobs now chairs UC Berkeley's department of city and regional planning. His books on urban design are considered bibles within his trade, and his students populate key positions in planning departments around the world.

And here's what the guru says: In parking, as with the rest of life, the best path is sophisticated, yet simple.

San Francisco should do nothing.

Fretting over parking is a waste of time and energy, Jacobs says. "If you don't pay attention to it, it goes away, and that's good because places that plan and build lots and lots of parking are usually lousy. And people will find ways other than driving to get to places they want to be if no parking is available," according to Jacobs. "Cities that are obsessed with the movement of cars, and spend a lot of time and money trying to avoid or solve traffic problems, are invariably less livable than cities that don't."

"So don't worry about parking. It's really not a problem."

Simple. Even simpler than it seems, actually. Because the alternative is horribly, disastrously, hideously complex. Building the thousands of new parking spaces that some desire will create worse problems than it solves.

Every added parking space draws another car, further clogging downtown streets, impeding buses, pedestrians, and other cars.

San Francisco's supervisors, newspaper columnists, parking lot managers, and even the mayor may deny the validity of this logic. But those whose job it is to understand how cities work say the relationship between added parking spaces and added urban congestion is not a matter of opinion. It's fact.

Adding thousands of parking spaces will undermine every other form of transit. Already, one-third of San Francisco's commuters enjoy free parking -- in the sense that someone else pays for it. That creates a preference for cars at the expense of mass transit, bicycles, walking -- the modes of getting around that make this a special city.

Increased traffic inevitably fuels a growing demand for wider streets, narrower sidewalks, and fewer places for people to work, shop, play, and gather. San Francisco, the most beautiful place in the world, could become more and more like its parking-friendly western cousins: Houston, Phoenix, San Jose -- not cities really, but developed areas.

Mainstream San Francisco business groups know this, and they are disturbed by the assertions of fringe organizations such as the Building Owners and Managers Association.

"We know that if all the parking BOMA wants would be built we wouldn't be able to get to the structures because there would be so many cars," says Anita Hill, director of the Yerba Buena Alliance, a South of Market business group.

Fears that the city might someday drown in a surfeit of parking spaces are not new. During the early 1980s, when banking, insurance, and real estate companies were growing in the city like kudzu, planners, business leaders, and civic leaders realized that the city's development boom could end in gridlock if it were built on the backs of automobiles.

Unless development went ahead WITHOUT significant added parking, the Baghdad by the Bay appeared doomed.

San Francisco's Downtown Plan, drafted in 1983 and still the presumptive guiding document behind city planning decisions, made clear the city's official aversion to new parking. In 15 years, from the mid-'60s to the early 1980s, the square footage of downtown office space doubled with no appreciable increase in parking.

Huge hotels, such as the downtown Grand Hyatt, were built without parking spaces. Today, downtown San Francisco is the most bustling, pleasant, walkable city center in the western United States.

When 1989's black October came, followed by a deep California recession that lasted into the mid-1990s, the Downtown Plan's anti-parking ethos became inconsequential. City leaders stopped worrying about how to properly manage growth and turned their attention to restarting a stalled economy. San Franciscans had a decade to forget the lessons they'd learned about growth and access and transit and streets and cars and parking.

Then came the Internet boom.

Willie Brown Jr., a mayor never known for his aversion to juice, nor for a concern for transit, began promoting development without a thought to how people would get to work. Perhaps he imagined they'd take their cars.

A small fringe of parking garage managers, building owners, and their sympathizers at the city's biggest daily newspaper attempted to spawn a peculiar type of parking hysteria. They managed to extract a vague promise from the mayor to build some 10,000 parking spaces. The Planning Commission followed suit, approving thousands of parking spaces to be built with office buildings around the SOMA and Potrero region -- a policy that would have been considered horribly destructive by an earlier generation of civic leaders.

But the hysterics have it wrong.

They should heed Allan Jacobs:

Let it be

Let it be

Let it be.

Already, a series of cultural shifts, transit revolutions, and civic plans are solving the parking problem on their own. And they will continue to do so, unless parking lots get in their way.

This Zen approach can be seen at work in another Zen-like endeavor: baseball. Through a massive advertising campaign, the San Francisco Giants convinced half their fans to forsake cars when traveling to the new ballpark. This for a team that moved to Candlestick Park in 1960 for the parking spaces.

How did they do it? Public relations, says Giants ballpark transit director and former Allan Jacobs student Alfonso Felder. The Giants embarked on a mission to drill the pro-transit message into the soul of every single fan.

"Really, no matter how you interacted with the Giants, whether it was with our Web site, our broadcasts, whatever, it would have been hard not to have been touched by the message, which was that there were a number of ways to get to Pacific Bell Park and that you were encouraged to take transit."

A few blocks from the ballpark, a second corporate experiment in the Zen of no parking has likewise found The Way.

Sony Inc.'s Metreon also has flourished by convincing its customers to leave their cars at home. "Making it pedestrian-friendly and transit-friendly is very important," says Metreon General Manager Kari Novatney. "Sony is a sophisticated and urban concept and brand, so I don't think we would be out in the mall in the middle of a parking lot.

"Thirty percent of our folks took Muni or BART, 30 percent walked, and 30 percent drove. It's worked amazingly well."

Sony and the Giants aren't the only travelers along this New Way. San Francisco's Municipal Railway, which for years has been the most anti-transit agency in the land, has begun to follow a different path.

During the past 10 years, as Muni decayed, more and more people walked or biked to work. But mostly, they drove, clogging the thousands of new parking spaces that were created with the destruction of the Embarcadero Freeway.

But Muni is really, actually, if you can believe it, becoming born again.

Thanks in part to a ballot measure last year that changed the way the system is funded and managed, Muni officials have been taking steps to improve, and even some of Muni's harshest critics are praising new Director Michael Burns.

The San Francisco Planning Department, meanwhile, is embarking on a plan to build "transit villages," three entirely new neighborhoods specifically designed to allow residents to take Muni instead of their cars.

The city is spending $1.3 million on plans to explore locating housing, commercial, and office projects in places where public transportation is or will be plentiful, including blocks along the Octavia Boulevard parkway being vacated by the Central Freeway, Balboa Park near City College, and the Central Waterfront, blocks southeast of SOMA's Multimedia Gulch.

The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, meanwhile, has gained city approval for the construction of bike lanes and other improvements on about a dozen city streets. An even more extensive bike lane network has been proposed specifically for SOMA.

About 3 percent of S.F. commuters now use bicycles; more than 50 percent, however, own bicycles, but are too scared of city streets to ride them regularly. A mere doubling of the number of bicycle commuters would ease the city's transit burden by hundreds of thousands of rider trips, and open up thousands of parking spaces.

Smallish transport solutions like these are going on quietly throughout the city, with almost no notice. One group, for instance, is gathering financing for a scheme in which the residents of entire apartment buildings would share a fleet of communal cars. If it succeeds, and spreads, the need for parking spaces would be dramatically reduced, says project organizer Gabriel Metcalf, himself a student of Jacobs.

During the past two years, 400 more taxis have been added to the city's fleet. Like buses and trolleys and sidewalks and bicycles, access to handy, safe taxi service reduces the need for cars -- and parking spaces.

But all these efforts could come to naught if we heed the calls for 10,000 new parking spaces.

So San Francisco, when the urge to build new parking garages strikes, take a walk. Wash dishes. Sit for a while.

Do nothing.

The results may astound you.