“This is a really good focus group.”

That’s  what Hank Wilson, the manager of parking policy at SFMTA, told a crowd of Bernal Heights residents last week at a contentious April 18  community meeting about SFMTA’s proposal to implement a new residential parking permit program (RPP) on select streets in northwest Bernal Heights.

During the meeting, more than a dozen Bernal Heights residents took turns scolding SFMTA for failing to provide timely information to local residents, repeatedly contradicting or redefining its own data about non-resident parking in Bernal Heights, and arbitrarily changing the rules that  will govern the proposed RPP in northwest Bernal.

The net result, as one Bernal resident pointed out, is that “[SFMTA is] pitting streets against each other, and neighbor a against neighbor.”

That was a recurring theme throughout the evening, as Bernal neighbors who both supported and opposed the parking plan described how the RPP program seems to have been designed from the outset to fuel neighbor-on-neighbor antagonism.

Quite rationally, neighbors who want RPP in northwest Bernal are thrilled that SFMTA seems determined to make the new permit parking zone happen, regardless how much the agency botched the process along the way.  Meanwhile, Bernal neighbors who either oppose the RPP zone, or who live on streets just outside of it, or who never ever heard about it at all because SFMTA failed to notify them, were told that the new zone is more or less a done deal.

“These people have more of a right to park here than those people,” explained SFMTA’s Wilson. “That’s the basis of the program.”

And so, on that cheerful note, what’s next for the Northwest Bernal RPP?

In a strange concession to SFMTA’s mismanagement of the Bernal RPP process, Wilson said that the agency has re-opened the petitions used to determine whether or not individual streets will be included in the northwest Bernal RPP.

SFMTA’s rule is that at least 50% of the households on each block must sign the petition to be included in the RPP zone.  Yet because SFTMA decided to reduce the maximum permit allocations from four permits per RPP household to two after the original petitions were submitted, Wilson said the petitions would be re-opened until May 17.

That means residents who previously voted yes on the RPP proposal, but who now disapprove of the proposed change, could use this opportunity to change their votes from Yes to No.

Meanwhile, Wilson said, northwest Bernal residents who previously voted No, or didn’t vote at all, now have until May 17 to sign the petition to get their street included in the new RPP.

If at this point you’re wondering, “Since SFMTA seems hell-bent on on implementing the northwest Bernal RPP, who would possibly vote now to remove their own street from the RPP zone?” — well, you’re right to wonder that. At this point, simple self-interest dictates that keeping your street in the new RPP is the rational thing to do. (cf. The Prisoner’s Dilemma)

And likewise, if you previously voted No to the RPP, but would now like to change your vote to Yes, well, that’s also a very rational thing to do, because who wants to live on a non-RPP block right next to a street that’s part of the RPP program? When the RPP program is implemented in northwest Bernal, parking on streets included in the RPP zone may or may not get easier. But it’s quite certain that the establishment of the new RPP zone will make parking on non-RPP streets nearby significantly more difficult.  (cf. The Prisoner’s Dilemma)

Of course, if you didn’t attend Hank Wilson’s community meeting on April 19, you probably wouldn’t know any of this.  To date, SFMTA hasn’t sent out postcards to northwest Bernal residents informing them of the re-opened petition, and SFMTA’s Northwest Bernal Heights Parking Pilot website hasn’t been updated to explain the outcome of last week’s community meeting or to indicate the new petition deadline.

And beyond that?

Sometime after May 17, SFMTA will release the tallies of the re-re-revised block-by-block petitions. With the final list of RPP blocks in hand, SFMTA will then push the northwest Bernal RPP proposal through the legislative process.

Because SFMTA is treating northwest Bernal RPP as an experiment,  it will require approval by the full SFMTA board of directors as a calendar item at an upcoming SFMTA board meeting (exact date TBD).  By all indications, this is likely to be a rubber-stamp gesture; Hank Wilson told the crowd at his Bernal Heights community meeting that he has never heard of an instance where the SFMTA board voted against an RPP proposal.

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On Wednesday evening the SFMTA will hold a community meeting about the agency’s much-debated plan to implement an experimental residential parking permit (RPP) system in northwest Bernal Heights. The meeting will happen on Wednesday, April 19 at 6:30 pm at Flynn Elementary School (3125 Cesar Chavez Street).

The postcard SFMTA sent to neighbors living in the proposed Northwest Bernal RPP zone says:

The SFMTA and Northwest Bernal Heights Residents invite you to a public meeting to discuss permit parking in Northwest Bernal Heights.

Residents on the following blocks have voted with over 51 percent to move forward with residential permit parking in Bernal Heights: Mirabel and Montezuma, Shotwell (1400-1599), Prospect (1-99), Esmeralda (200-299), Coso (1-299), Precita (1-299), Coleridge (1-99), Winfield (1-99), Lundy’s Lane (1-16) and Powers.

Please join use to hear details about next steps in the permit process, which includes a discussion about how this will affect residents in the area.

The Northwest Bernal RPP proposal, which started as a routine petition drive in 2015, has since become a polarizing exercise in  bungled communication, ad hoc rulemaking, and bureaucratic unaccountability.

After RPP petitions were collected from Bernal neighbors in 2016, SFMTA officials decided  Bernal Heights would become the test site for an experimental parking permit regime that de-emphasizes the impact of parking by non-Bernal residents to focus instead on curtailing parking by adjacent Bernal residents and restricting the number of parking permits each household may obtain within the RPP zone. Under the SFMTA’s experimental system for northwest Bernal, RPP permits would be limited to one RPP permit per driver, with a maximum of two RPP permits issued per household.

Advocates for the RPP zone say parking in northwest Bernal has become increasingly competitive because of daytime parking by non-residents, long-term parking by travelers, and residents who park in the street while using their garages for storage.

Opponents say SFMTA’s plan to use northwest Bernal as a test site was not disclosed in the original RPP petition drive, which renders those petitions invalid. After the petitions were received, SFMTA altered the requirements used to determine is whether a neighborhood qualifies to become a new RPP zone while repeatedly declining requests to define their new requirements. The agency has also faced allegations that SFMTA officials colluded inappropriately with RPP supporters by sharing private emails with RPP petition organizers.

As Bernalwood wrote last month:

The SFMTA is moving ahead with plans to use Bernal Heights as the site of an experimental Residential Parking Permit (RPP) scheme that will no longer emphasize preventing non-residents from parking on neighborhood streets. Instead, under the new system, the RPP program will also seek to limit the number of cars residents can park on the streets of their own neighborhood.

As previously reported, the SFMTA’s Bernal parking survey showed that roughly 70% of the cars parked on northwest Bernal streets on a typical weekday afternoon likely belong to other Bernal Heights residents. Under SFMTA’s longstanding rules, at least 50% of parked cars would have to belong to non-residents in order to establish a new RPP zone.

Yet after some residents organized a petition drive last year to establish a new RPP zone in northwest Bernal, the SFMTA moved its own goalposts. The 50% non-resident requirement was quietly disregarded, but SFMTA has not explained what the updated criteria for establishing a new RPP zone will be.

For current information about the Bernal RPP proposal, visit SFMTA’s Northwest Bernal Heights Residential Permit Parking Pilot page.

PHOTO: Top, by Telstar Logistics