On-Street Getaround-Dedicated Parking Comes To The Haight

On-Street Getaround-Dedicated Parking Comes To The HaightPhoto: Camden Avery/Hoodline
Camden Avery
Published on January 13, 2015
You may have noticed a couple of changes to the parking landscape in the Upper Haight last week.
Four locations—Haight and Shrader (shown above), Haight and Stanyan, Oak and Central, and Parnassus and Clayton—have been converted to dedicated care-share parking spots for Getaround, the San Francisco-based car sharing service. 

The dedicated parking spots are part of the SFMTA's pilot program which is rolling out to test the waters for car-share services occupying dedicated on-street city parking spaces. Other spots reserved for car share companies recently rolled out in Hayes Valley and the Lower Haight.

The plan for share services to occupy city streets has met some significant resistance in the Upper Haight.

Getaround is currently working on three additional spots in the Haight, according to spokesperson Meg Murray: Oak and Cole, Fell and Masonic, and Frederick and Clayton. (It's unclear why so many neighborhood spaces will be dedicated to Getaround, as opposed to City CarShare and Zipcar. However, there is one City CarShare space planned for Cole and Frederick.)

Opposition to the program is chiefly that it will remove parking spots in the short term, although MTA spokesperson Andy Thornley stated that part of the city's reason for testing the program is the prediction that shared cars will result in a net increase in available city parking, because car-sharing programs reduce car ownership over time.

The Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council's vice president, Bruce Wolfe, told Hoodline in an email that while the HANC board has yet to formalize its opinion on the parking matter,  HANC's concerns include the following:

  • Serious level of inequity to the public and the surrounding community.
  • Insufficient public input over specific locations.
  • Unacceptable use of taxpayer-­funded public assets including the commodification of public space, and subsidizing  private profit using publicly funded resources.

HANC's primary concerns, according to Wolfe, are that a car-share parking program both reduces available city parking in the short-term (impacting residents and local businesses) and privatizes public space in a way that benefits a single private company and one small portion of the resident community in the Upper Haight.

The city's Car Sharing Policy and Pilot Project is scheduled to last two years, at the end of which the SFMTA will review the data, analyze patterns, and make the case for a permanent on-street car share permit program if the data and analysis support it.