This week, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Board approved a plan to implement a residential permit parking (RPP) scheme along select streets in northwest Bernal Heights. The vote on the SFMTA Board was unanimous.
Under the new RPP, which will be the first permit parking zone in Bernal Heights, residents who live on designated streets will be able to obtain permits allowing them to park their vehicles on the street throughout the day.
Parking for people without permits will be limited to 2 hours maximum from Monday to Friday between 8 am and 6 pm.
The Bernal Heights RPP will be the first in the City to reduce the number of permits each resident is eligible to receive. Under the new system approved this week, each RPP household can receive one permit per driver, with a maximum two permits per household.
Permit parking will go into effect along 16 blocks in Bernal Heights where more than 50 percent of residents signed a petitions to join a permit parking system. The Bernal streets that will have RPP include: Coleridge (1- 199), Coso (1 – 199), Fair (1-99), Lundy’s Lane (1-29), Mirabel, Montezuma, Powers, Precita (1 – 299), Prospect (00-199), Shotwell (1400 – 1599), and Winfield (1 – 99).
Under the RPP system, permits are issued only to people who live at addresses on streets within the permit parking zone. SFMTA surveys indicate that 77% of the vehicles currently parked on the streets in the new RPP zone belong to people who live within a half-mile of the zone, an indication that many those vehicles likely belong to other Bernal residents.
Bernal residents who live on streets adjacent to the RPP zone are not eligible to receive permits and will not be able to park legally in the RPP zone during daytime enforcement hours.
The SFMTA’s petition system had been criticized by some Bernal neighbors who said the process was marred by irregular deadlines and poor communication on the part of SFMTA staff.
At Tuesday’s SFMTA Board meeting, some members of the public expressed concern that RPP will make it harder for teachers at Leonard Flynn School in Precita Park and workers at nearby nonprofits to find daytime parking. Precita Park is not in the new RPP zone, so teachers and nonprofit workers do not qualify for parking permits. To address these concerns, SFMTA may alter its rules to issue permits to some teachers and nonprofit workers outside the RPP zone.
Permits will become available and signs will be erected to designate the RPP zone within a few months.
Bernalwood 
My startup shows no earnings and probably never will. Does that count as a non profit?
Not surprising given the bending rules for approval that allowed this to become a reality. Yes, the 16 blocks voted yes >50% but less than 25% voted for these restrictions in the area that could vote for this parking restriction and will be impacted. From the SFMTA’s perspective, there are ~3,000 units in the surveyed area with a potential for 2 stickers per unit at $128 per year, that amounts to around $1.5 million dollars a year in mailing out car stickers! That is enough money to provide education for 3,000 students in Haiti a year or 100 kilos of pot from the harvest dispensary annually 🙂
People with parking stickers should be cited for parking on non-zoned streets for more than 2 hours.
What a great idea.
I believe that non-resident owners of property within the district can also get annual permits. (Unless they removed that in the final version).
See what you get when you get all huffy about parking? The problem isn’t daytime parking; it’s nighttime parking, which the permits don’t address. While I no longer live in Bernal I have computer tech and security camera customers all over Bernal, and I never have trouble finding parking there during the daytime.
3,000 units. 25% voted. ~50% voted yes. So ~375 households initiated this disaster. LOL.
You map is inconsistent with the narrative: the narrative says Coleridge Street 1 – 199 will be included, but the map stops at 99 Coleridge. The 100 – 199 block’s vote didn’t count because “less than 50% of residents on the block voted”. Why? Because the 100 – 199 block includes the Coleridge Park senior residence that houses 100 seniors, most of whom don’t have cars and didn’t vote. I hope whoever started this disaster never finds a parking space again. Anywhere.
Hope that never comes to the other side of the hill
Please take it all the way up prospect for they do not clean this street and people park on the hill for days. No fun being the bad guy.
It is only a night time issue after ten!
I’m confused. If you live within the yellow dashed line but NOT on a blue street can you still obtain a permit??
No, permits (and daytime parking) are only available to houses on the blue streets.
i’m somewhat confused by this in general. What would be the rationale for voting against the RPP. It appears to me, unless I’m missing something, that the RPP will put pressure on those parts of the neighborhood that are not in the RPP, so the logical thing to do is to vote for the RPP.
There, of course, may be other reasons, ethical etc to vote against the RPP, (and i’d be delighted to hear arguments for and against it), but it would seem that a self interested actor would vote in favor of it.
Finally, the inclusion of Prospect between Virginia and Esmeralda is ‘interesting’, given that a lot of/most of one side of the street doesn’t have any houses on it.
Well, if we’re only looking at self-interest, here are some reasons against:
–increased DPT presence/increased ticketing of all parking infractions (pointing the wrong way, wheels not curbed, out of date registration) beyond permit related ticketing.
–impact on all visitors (family members, guests, house sitters, contractors) who might like to park for more than 2 hours on my street. Additional permits available (for a fee) up to 20/year, I think. After that you are SOL.
–paying a fee for the right to park on my street (which I currently can do for free) without improving the difficulty with night time parking, the only time parking is truly challenging.
But if we are to look beyond self-interest, here are a couple more reasons against:
–impact on working folks (teachers, health care workers) who commute into the neighborhood to help improve our community, many of whom have been priced out of SF.
–impact on lower income neighbors, for whom the price of permits and uptick in parking tickets would be a hardship.
To that I would add that privileging some neighbors with preferential parking on public streets, with no regard for the negative impact to the surrounding neighborhood is, well, un-neighborly.