Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

It's too damn big

It’s pretty obvious that cars are getting bigger and bigger. What has not gotten larger in commensurate are the width of roads, and the size of home garages. The former is easy enough to fix: just tear up the current lane markings, and replace with ones wider apart. Obviously, certain streets are going to be impossible to do. For those situations, I think you simply have to ban cars of a certain size. Much like how some residential neighborhoods prohibit 18-wheeler trucks from entering.

Parking lots are similar to roads. The lot at my workplace have already gone through a widening of the berths. Previously, it had gotten so bad that you cannot open your own driver door if the car to your immediate left did not park exactly in the middle of two lines. You know who’s got the best parking lot? IKEA. The berths there are so wide - to accommodate furniture loading - that even the largest of SUVs has no issues fitting in comfortably.

Logic would say that if cars continues to get bigger, it’s only a matter of time before the parking structure at work will need to have its lines repainted again.

Cars becoming too wide to fit home garages is a far more difficult fix. Some of the older homes I see in San Francisco, ones built way back in the previous century, have garage openings that appears incapable of allowing a modern SUV to pass through. No wonder people would rather park on the street and use their garage space as storage! Widening a garage aperture is going to cost many thousands of dollars, and applying for a few permits. As we know, permits in San Francisco are super easy to get, so long as you know who to bribe.

One of the items to check off when buying a house should absolutely be: can your car fit in the garage with room to spare? Or maybe this is only a San Francisco problem. Everything is bigger in Texas, am I right?

Let's get it!

Hello! Welcome to 2024. That means the residential parking permit on my BMW M2 is due for renewal. (That’s right: pay to park in front of your own house.) And what the French? The price has jumped from $148 annually of last year, to now $170. I understand inflation is inevitable (Thanos style), but this is just plain greed. The city of San Francisco is collecting more money from us for parking simply because it can. You can’t possibly tell me that administrative costs for the program have risen 15%. They don’t even print out stickers anymore because license plates are scanned.

I’m still going to pay the new price like a chump, of course. Where else am I going to park my car?

The start of the new year also means increased traffic at your local gym. I wish all the New Year's resolutioners the very best. Consistent exercise is the most beneficial thing for the body and its longevity. I hope your gym visits also reach decent longevity. My advice? (Because, you know, as a person who works out three times a week every week, I am ultra qualified to give.) Don’t try to do a lot - or change a lot - at once. Stick with a certain program or routine for at least six weeks.

More importantly: embrace the suck. The days when you do go for that run - despite everything enticing you to not (warm bed, everything that’s in the iPhone) - are the true winning days. The freshness of New Year’s resolution wears off really quickly. That enthusiasm for change will only sustain you initially. If you don’t find another motive force to keep going - be it the carrot or the stick - then that is when people quit. I’ve certainly quit on things started on January 1st before.

Anything that is worthwhile takes time. A long time.

He’s sick of seeing. Yeah, that’s what it means.

That's my spot

I’m lucky to live in a neighborhood where street parking is abundant. There’s no war here to preserve spots, or perform car musical chairs on street cleaning days. I don’t worry about not having a spot to park when I return from from errands. It’s a complete contrast to my previous abode (read: my parents’ house), where street parking is at a premium. Even now, when I go back to visit, I often have to park blocks away.

There’s so much street parking here - and large, useable driveways in the homes - that there’s really no “dibs” on any space. Typically, the space directly in front of a home is assumed to “belong” to that household, an unwritten rule of sorts. Neighbors know to respect that arrangement, because they wouldn’t want someone taking the spot directly in front of their home either. There’s no need for such rules in this neighborhood. Someone took the space directly in front? The space next to it is almost always open.

But, it seems one particular neighbor is surprisingly specific about where he like to park his Lexus sedan. So much as that he would move it to the prefer spot soon as it gets vacated, even though the Lexus is parked literally one spot further down. Fire up the engine simply to move the car 20 feet? I guess not everyone is as sympathetic to a car’s mechanicals as I am. Worse thing you can do to a gas engine (electric is exempt from this, obviously) is to cold start it up and then shut it off again in a very short period. The condensation from sitting for a long period never gets a chance to burn off.

This is why when I move my BMW M2 for street cleaning, I actually drive a loop around the neighborhood to get the engine up to temperature. I would never start the car only to drive to the other side of the street. Nor would I get angry that someone have taken “my” usual spot.

Drive-by ticketing

I didn’t know the technology that meter maids carry are so advanced these days! I guess gone are the days of them actually stepping out of the car, taking out a pad, and then jotting down the details onto a ticket. Nowadays they use a scanning device to take down a car’s license plate number. The same device then prints out the ticket, whereby the meter maid then puts onto the windshield. The entire process takes less than 10 seconds, like a drive-by shooting.

I witness this just yesterday. It was our side of the street’s turn for its twice-monthly street cleaning. Our neighbor failed to move their Lexus out of the way - not the first time this year. The meter maid came and ticketed the car in a blink of an eye. I honestly would have missed it if I wasn’t staring directly at it outside my room window. San Francisco State University uses the same technology to police its parking lots. Remember when tickets included a mail-in envelop? Not anymore! All you get now is a some-what waterproof piece of paper with details on how to pay online.

On behalf of San Francisco residents, I would like to thank our neighbor for contributing to the city’s funds. Thank you so much for your service! God knows with the dwindling tax base of empty downtown offices, San Francisco needs all the revenue it can get from other places. My housemate was walking the dog at the same time yesterday and saw a non-insignificant number of cars getting ticketed around the neighborhood. Thank you to those drivers as well for their service. What’s the price of a street-cleaning violation ticket these days anyways?

I can smugly say I avoid getting ticketed by inputing the street cleaning days onto my calendar. I then receive alerts for it the night before. Impossible for me to miss! Besides, unlike our neighbor, my housemate would actually warn me if I forgot to move my car for whatever reason. That’s what neighbors do - if we like you.

Waiting for class

On my daily walk to work, I would see students parked along each side of 19th Avenue. Now that 50 percent of courses are back in physical session, there’s quite a few of them every morning. I would see the students sit in their cars whist waiting for their classes to start. It brings me back to my own college days. Instead of 19th Avenue, I would park at the other side of campus on Lake Merced Drive. I too have to get there early in the morning just to snatch a parking spot.

But I wouldn’t sit in my car to wait for classes to begin, however. Partly because I didn’t have a smartphone until my fourth year of college. The kids these days have it easy! Super fast Internet device at the palm of their hands. I too would chill in my Toyota Corolla if I had an iPhone back then. Instead I went to the library or the student union and sat there, listening to music on my iPod. Remember those?

Speaking of music, a few days ago the streaming service Spotify had an outage. One of my friends texted the group saying he now has to listen to his own MP3 collection, which only dates out to around 2010. I of course don’t have such problems. Unlike everybody else, I have not made the transition to streaming. To this day I continue to buy and download my music, stored completely on device. Not as a defense against Internet outages, but more like I’m a digital hoarder and prefer to have my curated collection.

179 gigabytes and counting…

But that’s the thing with streaming: there’s always this theoretical possibility that the services will go out of business and then you wouldn’t have access to your music anymore. Or your TV shows and movies. Videos I tend to watch once and forget about it, so losing access wouldn’t hurt. Music, however, I listen to constantly every single day. Therefore I would like some modicum of insurance in case shit happens. So long as I can still buy individual songs and albums on the iTunes Store, I will continue to do so.

Down with RPP

In San Francisco, a portion of residential streets have this thing called residential parking permits. During the weekdays, there’s a time limit on how long a vehicle can be parked on such streets (usually one or two hours). To avoid this hassle, people who live there can apply for a permit. The privilege of being able to park your car in front of your house during the day costs about $150 per year.

The permit system serves two functions. One, the city gets the obvious racketeering-like revenue. Two, it prevents an overcrowding of cars parked on the street. Outsiders can’t take up spaces all day, and each additional car owned by residents would cost extra to park. I now live in an area with residential parking limits, and it’s rather nice to have ample parking available at all times. Because of this, I don’t have to dread coming home (or leaving in the first place) and worry about where to park.

It’s as close to having a private garage space as I can get.

Contrast that to my parents house, where it’s no-limit parking in the neighborhood at all times. Finding a spot is always a challenge, because each household have many cars (we have three ourselves). It seems half of them are always parked on the street, unmoved and unused during the work week. On late nights returning home, you’re almost guaranteed to have to park many blocks away. It’s a hassle and a battle. Soon as you leave your spot, another car is sure to fill it in no time.

February marks the start of a new annual on the parking permit in my neighborhood, which means I am finally able to get one for the M2. I waited this long - I moved here back in November of last year - because the city only prorates the cost for half a year. I did not want to pay the $75 for only three months. In the meantime, I’ve been parking the car at work during the weekdays, which thankfully is just a 10-minute walk away. It’s going to be great to be able to park in front of where I live (easily) once again.

I've found SF's parking problem

I’m one of the lucky ones to have the city’s public transportation network be super convenient for my purposes. The bus-stop for the bus I take to work is only a block’s walk from my house, and the second-leg light-rail train gets me literally right to the door – the stop’s name is the university. The decision to cease commuting by car almost a year ago has been hugely beneficial to my overall mental health. I take serene pleasure in getting lost in podcasts on the train, only paying scant outward attention to ensure I don’t miss my stop.

I also enjoy the walk to the bus-stop, short it may be. It’s a good opportunity to get some sun, which is crucial because the university is at the western end of San Francisco - notorious for its lack of sunshine. Plus, our office is in the basement level with zero windows; the brief stroll to the bus-stop might be the only chance I have to get some needed vitamin D.

A thing I’ve noticed lately on those strolls is the sheer numbers of cars parked on the street – in the middle of a workday. Mind you I live in a decidedly residential area, so very few people would commute to my neighborhood for work. Therefore, it’s safe to assume the massive number of cars that remains stationary on the streets belong to residents.

In a city that’s infamous for its parking difficulties, I have to say it seems the problems are self-inflicted. It’s clear to me now that each household simply owns too many cars, so much so that during a workday, the residential streets are still full of them. All these vehicles are just sat there taking up space; it’s no wonder there’s such an immense parking space battle after the 5pm for the people returning home from work via car.

You may point out that perhaps those parked cars represent people that take the bus like I do, so that’s actually a good thing from the perspective of the environment or whatnot. To that I’d say, yes, good on them for taking public transportation – if that is the case, but it doesn’t change the fact they’ve left cars behind on the streets doing absolutely nothing. Indeed, I too have a weekend only car, but the 911 is parked in an actual lot, merely taking up space I paid for.

San Franciscans are wont to complain about the utter lack of parking, and how finding a spot requires prolonged games of musical chair, and every bit of luck. Well, it would seem a big part of it is our own fault. I wouldn’t go as far to say people should buy fewer cars; just that they should use a mirror next time they gripe about trouble finding a spot.