Does SF Allow "Illegal" Church Parking? SFMTA, SFPD Don't Seem To Agree

How would one file such a complaint?

You should call your local (assuming the car in question is double-parked in your neighborhood) police station. For nonspecific complaints, Tomioka suggested people "write letters." I would go with email, personally.

What's a few hours on a dead morning when a lot of people are still asleep? Leave it alone. Cyclists shouldn't fight more battles. Geez.....

it's odd that this is coming up now, because it's been like this for years and years. Certainly at least 10 years. Is it just that the number of cyclists in the city has reached a high enough number that people are suddenly now noticing it? I think that an argument can be made that this violates separation of church and state, but I doubt that it'll change anything. Write all the letters you want, it's still a losing battle.

I'll be out this Sunday photographing cars and licence plates for the SFPD to follow up on.

Wow, loosen up already! Since when did SF get all uptight? and about a little parking for a few hours on Sundays? Don't you have better things to get all pissy about?

5-10 years back, it seemed like there was a church on every block in my neighborhood. I always thought it was suspicious, but at the same time, thought it was kind of cool that this behavior was allowed. It was also never a problem to find someone to move a car if it was really in the way.

This sudden reaction to parking around Churches has nothing to do with religion or bicyclists.

It has everything to do with outrage over the high price of parking tickets that the City

issues by the thousands. People are fed up and this is one way to vent anger at the

crushing costs of parking tickets.

It goes back at least 45 years; I've been here for half that time and it was a long-established practice in the late '80s.

From 1991 to 1995 I lived on the block of Dolores that's home to the Mission Dolores church/basilica; I have EXTENSIVE experience with the parking patterns there. And I too developed a nagging grievance (that eventually became an outrage) that the local population was being punished by an unfair church/state collusion. But my gripe had nothing to do with the loss of a driving lane, oh no. Nope, I was pissed off because the city was using what I'll call "the church exemption," to nab local residents on parking violations. Here's what happened:

Came home very late on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. I parked in "the middle of the street," i.e., in one of those huge gaps in the median divider that's very specific to Dolores -- in between the palm tree plots, which was (and, I assume, continues to be) a defacto, quasi-legal place to park. Parking perpendicular to the street this way, about 5-6 cars can fit in a gap, if memory serves. And if you parked there late enough at night, and moved your car before the meter readers started their job the next morning, you wouldn't suffer a ticket. I.e., neither regular old cops nor any other type of law enforcement issued tickets. And this was true for ANY night of the week. You just had to move your car before the parking enforcement golf carts hit the streets, which if memory serves was around 7am.

OK, so I park in the median divider gap. It's probably 2:30am. I figure "Yay! For once I will be a beneficiary of the Sunday church parking. I won't have to move my car. I'll sleep in, and all the church goers will fill in their cars around my car, and I can move my car when they move THEIR cars, sometime late Sunday morning."

Next morning wake up; cars are parked on the street in one of the driving lanes, and in the median divider; regular old Sunday on Dolores between 16th and 17th. But my car has a F'ING TICKET! The ticket's time stamp reads something like 5:55am. So what's happened here is the parking department has sent out their golf carts early to sweep up all the local residents who've parked "illegally," but also BEFORE the church attendees arrive with their cars. Total, utter bullshit.

I made a couple of calls to various city services (can't remember which ones) to complain about what I saw as a gross violation of church/state separation, and got nothing back but "But city allows this for Church services; you parked illegally, you're SOL."

Outrageous.

DPT has any number of "Most favored Guest Parkers" in the City of San Francisco.

Unfortunately, the groussers are not on any of those lists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02FHNl9CTJM

That's just the half of it. I was excited to go to Dolores Park on a Sunday so I could park on the wrong side of the road while at the park. Guess what? I got a ticket for parking on the public road while the church-goers did not! Who could tell the difference? Likely not DPT, my money is on the church-goers calling me in. It seems they thought they owned the street that day. DPT, it seems, agrees.

It's B.S.!

Turn-about is fair play. Your turn is up!

I'm one of the first to stamp out default christianization of public policy.

However, in the Western Addition, many of the churches there represent the thread that holds together the African American community that was literally decimated by redevelopment two generations ago.

These folks live in diaspora from San Francisco, and their churches serve as a focal point to maintain generations long relationships.

Chalk up one athiest cyclist in support of affirmative action for the church parking in the WA.

At the time you were violating Traffic Code Sec. 56 (since late 2008, its Transportation Code, Sec. 7.2.34); the City has never treated those as "quasi-legal" spaces. My aunt was getting ticketed for that on Dolores as far back as the '70s.

Fortunately, I don't have churches anywhere near my home, but it angers me to see this concession to out-of-towners.

I have considered organizing church services in my home, just to see what happens when I tell DPT and the SFPD that we worship on Friday nights and expect to be able to block a lane of Dolores St., just like the Christians do on Sunday. This would be a temple of the North American Reformed Druids (the "reformed" bit comes from including shrubbery in our venerations).

This strikes me as the whining of jealous car owners who have paid too many tickets and religious intolerance. If this is about the safety of cyclists and not simply an anti-religion crusade by angry white people who have circled the block one too many times in their VW Bug, why doesn’t someone bring these concerns up directly with the churches whose congregations are causing the problems? If both parties consider themselves part of a community maybe a compromise can be worked out – one that honors the traditions and cultures of the neighborhood as well as the safety of the residents. And if you are that gung-ho about separation of church and state and want to do something about upholding our nation’s Constitution, find a better cause.

It's completely disingenuous for the parking department to say "the City does not seek out double parking cases to issue citations" -- routinely when the Church parking "monitors" leave and there are a few unfortunately stragglers left parked in the lane, DPT comes through and tickets and tows these cars -- on Sunday afternoon.