Street sweeping leads to drop in revenues

Earlier this year, the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency decided that a good way to save some money would be to change the street sweeping rules in parts of this city. What that meant was that some neighborhoods would start seeing their streets swept twice a month, instead of every week. Muni projected roughly $1 million in savings by not sweeping as often. Plus, as a resident of one of those neighborhoods, it was quite tiring to have to move your car twice a week just to avoid getting a ticket- couple that with limited street parking and tourists taking up those spots over the weekend, I would spend upwards of an hour sometimes just driving around trying to find a parking spot.

Well, it turns out that by not sweeping and not issuing parking tickets to those unlucky people who forget to move their car is costing the city $3.8 million a year in lost revenue from parking tickets. As usual, the geniuses that make up the Board of Supervisors want Muni to go back to revisit this decision, noting the loss of revenue.

Just so I'm clear here- Muni made a decision that it could save some money by not running street sweepers as often, not to mention that some streets just don't need to swept every week. Case in point- the numbered streets in the Inner Sunset went from every Monday and Wednesday to the 1st and 3rd Monday and Wednesday's of the month (except for 9th, which is a business district; they still sweep twice a week), but streets like Lincoln and Irving kept their sweeping schedule. So, Muni appeared to have done some amount of homework on what streets were being over-swept. But, due to the lost revenue from parking tickets related to street sweeping, the city wants Muni to go back and see if they should re-institute some of these inefficient sweeping schedules, solely because of the lost revenue.

I don't know, but I was unaware the certain municipal activities, like street sweeping, were supposed to be revenue earners for the city. I thought street sweeping was supposed to, you know, clean the street of debris and other safety-related reasons. But the city, never missing an opportunity to reach into the pockets of its residents (who, pursuant to City housing rules, likely do not have adequate on-site parking), want to figure how Muni can recover that lost revenue, and potentially re-institute Muni's otherwise wasteful and inefficient use of its property and personnel.

Since I no longer have to drive around twice a week to find a parking space, I can only wonder how much emissions I'm no longer emitting due to these new rules. Not to mention the emissions from the street sweepers and the little parking ticket vehicles that fan out in front of the street sweeper, writing $50 tickets. You'd think that if the City truly did care about emissions, these rules would be welcomed; instead, all the city really cares about is money. And if an otherwise good program ends up costing the city in lost parking ticket revenue, well, by-golly, that can't be right.