Parking

There was a kind of Wild West situation with parking in the city. Even though the population of San Francisco was smaller then, there were more cars per household. These days, single families often occupy entire houses that would previously provide two or three separate rented flats, each holding a few renters apiece. So a few decades ago, the car count for a house might have been six or eight instead of just one or two now. Cars were cheap, taxis were unreliable, and public transportation in SF has never been great. (It’s nothing like New York: here, trains here only go to certain neighborhoods, and bus service has always been a little lame especially in the evenings).

In more crowded neighborhoods like the Haight, if you drove home late at night, there’d often be nowhere to park. So people would park on sidewalks, or on street corners. Double-parking for extended periods of time was not unusual. I used to get a parking ticket like once a month, then after a few of them would pile up, I’d go down to the Hall of Justice and protest. I’d tell the judge I was a scrub making $15k a year and she’d cut the bill in half. Fortunately rent was like $250 a month, so parking tickets were regarded as just part of the cost of doing business.