My favorite San Francisco politics story from the last week: eight months ago, San Francisco decided to save money by cleaning certain streets only once every other week, rather than every week. The program was supposed to save $1 million per year in cleaning costs.
Unfortunately, the city government neglected to appreciate the auxiliary benefits of regular street cleaning: massive fees in parking tickets. So, how's it working out?
When city officials cut street sweeping in more than 20 neighborhoods in August to save cash, they knew that the change would lead to a loss in revenue from parking tickets. ... They probably didn't anticipate that the city would lose four times more money than it saved ... Street-sweeping tickets, at $50 a pop, dropped 26 percent on the affected routes from October to December, compared with the previous year, according to city figures.
Ever since they started this every-other-week thing in my neighborhood I've gotten several tickets because I can never remember whether I need to move the car or not, whereas before I knew to move it every Tuesday and Friday and almost never got a ticket.
Posted by: Jim Ramsey | April 26, 2009 at 10:16 PM
I had a similar insta-chuckle over this. "Ha ha, aren't we dumb." Then I thought: Isn't it kind of obvious that parking tickets and outrageous parking-meter rates (I think it's a quarter for 1 minute in some neighborhoods) are a huge source of city revenue? Isn't there a spreadsheet somewhere? Are we, in actual fact, this dumb? It seems like that's just a little bit too dumb.
Now I'm wondering: Will we go back to the original amount of street cleaning? Or even more? Mo' cleaning, mo' money. Cha-ching.
Posted by: Harold Check | April 27, 2009 at 08:18 AM