It’s just silly to talk about all streets having no cars. And, as Zizin pointed out, cars are paid for. Cars actually subsidize SF city programs through parking tickets (something like $30M was collected in 2007 from parking tickets).

Advocating for NO cars makes way less sense than advocating for smarter car use and better city planning when it comes to public transport and bike lanes and just garbles the message with extremism.

Now, imagine if Sunday Streets didn’t have to do some much for cars — if the volunteers could spend their time on other things, and the festival could go on all day long. It sure would be nice.

Like I’ve said — when an event like Sunday Streets is forced to go to great lengths to accommodate cars, ever car is a burden.

On Parking and towing:
The PD ran the plates of each car before they had it towed, and if the address was nearby, they went to the house and asked the owner to move their car. Signs were posted at least 72 hours in advance, placed every 20 feet along the entire route. Additional 4 ft x 4 ft signs were posted along the route 10 days in advance.

City Parking code specifically prohibits parking for more than 72 hours (article 10.2.6) http://www.municode.com/content/4201/1414/HTML/ach010.html, which is probably why we are required to post signs for at least 72 hours.

Outreach: We did what we could with virtually no funding for marketing- fliers on cars, posters in shops, emails to neighborhood lists, etc. but understand this effort did not reach everyone in the neighborhood. Our media outreach for this event was lighter than previous events because we were concerned that if we did TOO much publicity, the event would have been beyond capacity. It is a delicate balance. We are ramping up our local outreach to the neighborhood for July 19.

Who covers event costs: Sunday Streets costs are underwritten by our generous corporate and community sponsors. Additional in-kind support and our tremendous volunteers keep costs down.

Finally, the hours of 10:00 am to 2:00 pm are to accommodate the demand for the streets- traffic significantly increases on Sunday afternoons, which is why we have the events on Sunday mornings, when traffic is the lightest.

Thanks again for the great dialogue and for the support of Sunday Streets.

just look around you, LOADS of cars, with one person in each car. do i think it’s a good thing? meh. not really. but is it the truth? yeah it is. nearly 500K registered vehicles in SF (2009). well over 500K licensed drivers (it was 491K in 1996, 12 years ago).

and the cars have to go somewhere. parking spots on the streets seem a logical spot for them.

that said, i do agree with the “Stop whining and deal with it” notion. for both drivers and non-drivers.

BTW — I volunteer for animal organizations as well, and work a hard and stressful job on the side. All the while, I’m not parking my car where there are signs that I shouldn’t be parking it there.

Stop whining and deal with it.

Definitely– I was a bit puzzled it was only 10-2, but I guess it was traffic reasons or something? I understand you want to run some trials at first, but I hope they work up to a longer event.

As for the Sunday Streets, I thought it was cooler in idea than execution. I was hoping for street stalls ect, but I guess the event was too short for that. Instead it looked like a bike marathon. You could tell the kids were excited to play in the forbidden street spaces; but when I get worried about stepping into the street for fear of getting hit by a bike then we sorta just replaced one hazard with another.

Since it was towed by SFPD, I had to go to the station to get it released from police custody. The officer I talked to agreed with me that it is a completely unfair practice to have the city only be required to post those flimsy signs 3 days in advance before any festival. It should be at least a week prior so in case people go out of town/only move their cars for street cleaning get enough warning to avoid the hassle of a $400 ticket.

I think that street fairs and all the festivals/parties/whatever are great, but give the people a little more notice before towing our cars!

sunday streets is amazing. it encourages healthy lifestyles. and all those ‘white’ people that you may be complaining about, laura, hella helped out the neighborhood shops. as a kid born and raised in the mission, i loved this event, and was so happy to see it come to my hood.

I can’t say that we received the flyers, as we aren’t allowed to park on our own block most of the time due to PG&E, but I guess the organizers did as much as they could (Signs could have been a little bigger though,instead of those small paper diamond ones). But I will also say that $400 is way too excessive to have your car towed.