A little past 4 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, Andy McFood readied Kilowatt for happy hour. But, once again, he eyed 16th Street, worried about the vehicles double-parked on the block.
“At times, it’s hard because we have shows, and the bands need the space to park their van,” said McFood. And, officially, that space — a white loading zone in front of the bar — should be free for “passengers to get picked up or dropped off and to minimize double parking by those who are transporting them,” according to San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority code.
That’s not a freebie: To get a loading zone, Kilowatt and other businesses pay an $850 application fee and a renewal fee ranging from $575 to $2,300 every two years, depending on the length of the space.
The zone is important for the bar, McFood said, because it allows bands to unload their gear fast. But that’s hard to do when there’s a vehicle double-parked in front of the bar — something that happens most evenings. Most of these are food-delivery drivers picking up orders from nearby restaurants, according to neighbors and business owners in the area, who have long complained about the issue.
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, an SUV double-parked in front of Kilowatt, and then four other vehicles double-parked in front of that SUV; no vehicle could access the bar’s loading zone. One of the double-parked drivers got out of their car and started chatting with another driver.
“Sometimes, they just wait there for another order to pop up, so they can maximize the time and do two orders instead of one,” said Wendy Urdaneta, manager of Arepas, a restaurant at the intersection of 16th and Guerrero streets.
The double-parking has become so acute that the SFMTA held a virtual public comment meeting last Friday to discuss changes in parking regulations at a series of locations, including 16th Street between Guerrero and Valencia streets. The agency’s representatives said their engineers had flagged the high number of vehicles double-parking at this location, so many that the 22-Fillmore bus line was having problems going around cars on this stretch.
The agency is proposing changes to street design, namely turning some zones into dual parking zones — meaning they would be 30-minute commercial loading zones during the day, and general loading zones at night — and making changes to other commercial loading zones.
The agency also said it has asked for data from the delivery companies to better understand high-use pick-up and drop-off areas, and that it is working on a digital map of curb restrictions for drivers’ use.
But freeing up a few spaces will unlikely resolve the issues McFood and other residents witness.
During Friday’s meeting, callers said this has been a problem in the area for years.
Jenna Smith said she lived at the intersection of 16th and Guerrero streets for six years until she decided to move last year. One of the reasons, she said, was double-parking on this stretch.
“It was frustrating. We used to call it ‘the gauntlet,’ trying to get through there,” said Smith as she remembered cars even blocking her garage’s entrance.
“There’s definitely some choice words from some drivers that were like, ‘Fuck you, bitch, mind your own business,’” she continued. As a last resort, she called to have cars towed at least twice. “There has definitely been some hostility.”
For the restaurants’ part, the double-parked delivery cars are a necessity.
“There is no parking here, and there’s a lot of restaurants, and they [the drivers] bring a lot of business to the restaurant,” said Urdaneta.
A longtime city worker familiar with the issue said San Francisco’s infrastructure is not built to properly accommodate a high number of delivery and ride-hail vehicles. The worker said the focus should not be necessarily on the drivers but rather on the companies creating this technology.
“These companies have no incentive to tell drivers not to do this, because they want drivers to be as productive as possible,” the worker said. Plus, tickets don’t work, because the drivers see it as a risk they are willing to take, the worker added.
Mission Local reached out to Grubhub, Doordash and Postmates for this story, but only a spokesperson for Uber, which owns Postmates, replied, saying it communicates to all drivers to avoid restricted zones.
David Albiaris, a driver who was double-parked on 16th Street on a recent Thursday afternoon, said that he works for all the food delivery companies, and that he had not received such notifications from Uber. Neither had Ernesto Moncada, who delivers on a scooter.
“I would like people to understand that we are only trying to work. That’s it,” said Albiaris. “We are not trying to harm anyone. We just want to make a living.”
“We just want to make a living”…. Just like the Honduran drug dealers. Rules are for other people in San Francisco, never me.
Same refrain as from the unlicensed street vendors who don’t pay taxes and peddle stolen goods.
Agree – want to walk around naked – we will pass a law that you have to put a towel on the seat if you ride Muni; want to do drugs don’t worry we will give you free needles; want to run red lights don’t worry we won’t enforce because the meter maids get triggered by angry drivers. San Francisco is lawlessness squared.
This double parking is an issue btwn Valencia & 16thSt too, especially on Rondel, the cul de sac btwn Valencia & Hoff. Score of cars lines up on the alley btwn Panchovilla & MotherBar. Residents live in this street and emergency vehicles cannot access it. It’s a major issue if there’s a fire or medical emergency.
SFMTA needs to install bollards to prevent those parking on the sidewalks, and issue steep fines daily to drivers blocking residents, everyday 2-11pm they will make a killing.
≈ “For the restaurants’ part, the double-parked delivery cars are a necessity” is a very strange assertion, given that these parasitic app-driven gig-economy schemes have driven a number of their hosts to bankruptcy and out of business. Followed up by someone’s opinion about parking, as if this transit-rich corridor hasn’t thrived for decades before the gig-economy arrived.
This is another form of externalizing the costs of food delivery: If SFMTA actually ticketed the double parking drivers instead of pandering to them (see Valencia street center bike lane fiasco), things would change quickly: The delivery people would use other forms of transportation (ebikes/mopeds/bikes as in European cities), or the cost of the tickets would get baked into the cost of food delivery. As it stands Grubhub et al get all the benefits with none of the costs. SFMTA could have parking enforcement here if they actually cared.
This reminds me of how awful the double parking used to be on Valencia, before the protected mobility lane was added. Double parking and reckless driving have been such a problem ever since rideshare and delivery apps came on the scene. I hate to be a “things were better in the old days” guy, but the city had a chance to fix this problem when these apps first appeared, instead, they let them do whatever they wanted.
With the density of our city, there is a need to restrict some streets to only public transportation, taxi, and commercial delivery vehicles like in other parts of the world. Alternative modes of transportation also need to be promoted to reduce the car dependency and congestion.
This has been going on for way too long and the City did squat. Jeff Tumlin went on record a couple years ago how supposedly it didn’t make financial sense for the SFMTA to send parking enforcement down into the area, which included Valencia pre-center bikelane at the time. What a joke, in the evenings, they’d be able to hand out tickets by the dozens every hour, every day. Tumlin and the SFMTA not interested of course means that, as noted ” tickets don’t work because the drivers see it as a risk they are willing to take, the worker added.”
I say SFMTA/PD just get crackin’ and keep at it. It would work wonders and show you’re actually interested in improving street safety.
As far as the restaurants are concerned – it looks self defeating when you lower yourselves to the level ghost kitchens. Removing even more parking just means less dine-in and more dependence on the Doordashes of this world.
Hope loading zones will help. They should also keep parking meters on from 6 to 10pm during the dinner rush. It doesn’t make sense to have free parking at the busiest time. It makes the parking instantly fill up which leads to more double-parking.
You can see how absurd it is if you look at that block on the demand-responsive parking meter map: https://www.sfmta.com/demand-responsive-parking-pricing
Parking on that block of 16th is $1.25 per hour from 9am to noon, $5 per hour from noon to 6pm, and then free from 6pm to midnight. It’s ridiculous. The demand for parking on a restaurant corridor does not in fact suddenly drop to zero at 6pm. It’s the opposite.
@scottf
No, the meters stop at 6pm because that’s when the many residents of that block come home from school with their kids or their groceries, or job-site tools and try to park for the night. Yellow loading zones will still be illegally used by delivery drivers but will become off-limits for local residents or visitors. Why do we cater to business rather than families? Tax money. The gig drivers are enslaved by their app and cannot afford not to take delivery jobs on the Gauntlet. Everyone suffers except the Apps, the businesses and the lazy delivery-using customers. SFMTA is very rarely doing any enforcement. We’re all doomed.
Most residents of that block don’t have cars. If you’re driving every day, there are plenty of places to live that are not 1 block from a BART station and six bus lines. Lots of families across San Francisco and the Bay Area would love to live in a place with that kind of walkability and transit, but can’t afford it because there are so few places like that. It’s absurd to bend over backwards to instead accommodate households on whom all of that is wasted because they’re trying to recreate a suburban lifestyle in the middle of the city.
Not true, actually. I know my neighbors and we often commiserate over the struggle. I find that people who take your view are often (but not always) single, ‘work’ at home on a computer, and don’t need to transport cargo larger than a laptop and a yoga mat.
I live on Valencia near 16th Street. The center bike lane for many years was a loading zone for delivery trucks. I saw that deliveries went on without a hitch after the loading zone was eradicated. Thwew’a roo much whining here about parking and delivering.
Why has this all of a sudden become a problem? If we look at how our lives and parking issues used to be back before the reduction on legal parking spaces, we did not have such problems. Off-street parking for residents solves their problems, but those options were deemed offensive so the amount of off-street parking has been eliminated for residents. We introduced the Uber Lyft alternative to parking and we have the problem of more cars on the street. What do we learn from this? Off-street parking solves that problem and housing with parking is most desirable. How do we get back to a system that used to work since the current one is not working as well?
what no bike lane?
What does the city expect? Jeff Tumlin and the bike coalition have removed residential and business parking so that bike bros don’t have to drive a few extra blocks out of their way. There’s little concern for the brick-and-mortar merchants or for those of us who live in the neighborhood and need to deal with traffic and parking.