I work in the Financial District and every weekday I spot UPS, FedEx and a plethora of other commercial carrier trucks double parked.
It creates quite a mess for people who are driving. The horns honk, the cars jerk and jockey to cut in front of one another to get around the big double-parked delivery trucks.
It has never really bothered me too much because I take MUNI to work. I walk a few blocks from my home to catch public transportation. On the other end I walk just two-blocks to my office. Watching the weekday Financial District traffic mess is little more than an amusing pastime for me.
Still, I scowl at those trucks as I pass because they block progress and blatantly violate our City's traffic laws. I scowled, that was, until today. Next week I think I'll smile.
This morning I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that UPS paid $673,334 in fines for 11,788 tickets -- an average of one ticket every 45 minutes throughout the year. Eighteen companies have special accounts with the city to pay off parking tickets in bulk. Together, they racked up 27,395 tickets and paid more than $1.5 million in fines for the fiscal year that ended June 30. Great! What a wonderful additional revenue source for the City.
By the way ... you can read the full story by Rachel Gordon, a Chronicle staff writer, by following this link.
The issuance of parking tickets is big business for the City and I am all in favor of expanding the business. Let's hire more more parking enforcement officers and buy more parking enforcement vehicles and make sure we don't miss a single UPS or FedEx double-parked cash cow.
Just to illustrate the point, here are some statistics Rachel Gordon and the Chronicle put together:
By the numbers:
1.9 million: Approximate number of parking citations San Francisco issues each year.
$85 million: Approximate amount of fines collected.
27,395: Number of tickets issued to companies in the city's bulk-ticket program.
$1.5 million: Approximate amount these companies paid in fines.
Paying in bulk:
The top five companies enrolled in San Francisco's bulk-payment parking ticket program:
-- UPS: 11,788 tickets, $673,334 in fines
-- FedEx: 7,711 tickets, $434,046 in fines
-- Airborne Express: 2,581 tickets, $140,845 in fines
-- McMillan Electric Co.: 1,497 tickets, $74,375
-- Comcast: 1,067 tickets, $51,230
Note: All data from 2005-06 fiscal year. Source: San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency
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