A neighbor on Elsie was bemused to find this cranky parking note placed under the windshield wipers of many cars on the street.:
This was placed on many cars on the block, most of which DO belong to people on the street. I checked our security footage and saw someone doing it at 9:50pm. Unfortunately, the picture wasn’t very good.
It’s true; the picture isn’t very good. Then again, it’s better than no picture at all. Bernalwood has reviewed the security camera video, and we can confirm that it clearly reveals Cranky Parking Note-Leaver Person on Elie as a vigorous biped, and not… something else.
Here’s a still image of Cranky Parking Note-Leaver Person, leaving cranky parking notes on Elsie during the evening of July 10, 2014:
Bernalwood 
I think this is the same neighbor who caught a break-in but again the footage is pretty useless because its through what looks like a second story window.
Sure it’s a fun toy, but I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t generate a conviction if a serious crime was caught on film.
I think you’re right. I remember the previous post. Lots going on in front of their house!
Benchmark of a non-native species. Any time you park within walking distance of your home, it is a good day. Of all the neighborhoods I have lived in, Bernal has the easiest parking,
I agree! It’s all about perspective, which perhaps some of these neighbors need. When I lived near the Panhandle it wasn’t abnormal to take 45 minutes to find a spot 5 or 6 blocks away, and feel lucky. We have it good here on the hill!
When caught, note writer should be sentenced to 6 months of valet parking for residents of Lower Haight, Telegraph Hill, and the Inner Richmond.
Ha, I’ve written about this several times before as well. Difficult parking is trying to park for the night in the panhandle/lower haight/cole valley on a Sunday and circling for 30 minutes until you’ve almost lost your mind.
Having to park one block over in Bernal doesn’t constitute difficult parking.
IT IS STUPID to drive around and around. I’ve lived in some very difficult places, Bernal Heights, Russian Hill, Pacific Heights, Inner Mission (Clinton Park and Guerrero), Tenderloin, etc. It only took a few times to see where the parking was tough and where wasn’t, so instead of driving around and around I simply drove to the area where parking was most likely, got out and walked back to my place. Yeah, it might be 3 or 4 blocks, but the exercise was good and the time and fuel saved by not driving around and around was also good.
Someone on my block of Treat just calls the MTA without leaving a warning note, So as cranky as this Elsie person is, the Treat crank is even crankier! My neighbor parked his car on Sunday and was given a 72-hour notice on Monday–does the MTA respond to other nore pressing issues so rapidly? And of course the crank who called lied about how long the car was parked there.
Obviously your friend parked in a space that someone considered “theirs” 🙂
Fascinating that MTA responded so quickly.
Totally unneighborly to do sh&t like that. An angry person unable to direct their anger at whomever or whatever institution deserves to bear their rage.
Passive aggressive notes have been found to be highly effective at irritating aggressive aggressive people.
I’ve lived in much more parking-starved neighborhoods than Bernal and never encountered this sort of crankiness. A few folks around here need a bran muffin, it seems.
Another reason to ride a bike!
I live on Cortland at Winfield, so am I barred from parking on Elsie (ONE block up the hill)? This is such a joke. I have received notes after 36 hours, which is nuts, we all have to move the cars every 24 hours? 12 hours? As I have noted previously, if you are going to leave a note at least offer your email or “meet me on the Bernalwood comment sections, my screen name is “XXXX” so that a reasonable dialogue can be had.
Something tells me the note leaver has no interest in a reasonable dialog!
Leave a note under your windshield wiper that reads “Car parked on (date) at (time). May remain in this spot until 72 hours have passed.”
+1
+2!
Those flyers are copies of a flyer that some neighbor on elsie keeps leaving on my car. Copies were made and put on everyone’s car on that section of street to bring attention to the good neighbors of that street that some low life would go out of their way to make this flyer and call the mta to report vehicles they think shouldn’t be on “their” street. Sorry if it annoyed some of you but it was the only way to out whoever made is flyer.
Wha? I don’t get how this helps or outs anybody.
Glad I’m not the only one who was confused by that comment. Sounds almost like bernal neighbors is the person in the photo distributing the flyers in a bizarre attempt to “out” the neighbor who made the original flyer. Or how to interpret that admission??
Also, Matthew on cortland, I completely agree with you.
You know what bugs me? The BPB Construction (or whatever) cars and vans left all over Bernal. The black ones with the yellow writing. They leave at car at the corner of Andover and Cortland right at Goodlife, which is a great spot if you just need to run in for milk. I don’t know why THEY don’t get cranky notes… they leave their cars and vans there for days on end and only move them for street cleaning, just to put them right back.
Oh man, don’t get me started. One of my peeves about my bernal house is a relative of a neighbor that parks his work truck in front of their place across from my bedroom, on a narrow side street. He doesn’t even freaking live there, but he leaves a big ass work truck there all the time, and often he and his co-wrolers arrive before 6am to load it up and move it out, with one of their cars reserving the parking spot of course.
UH…there is NO right to park your or their vehicle overnight on a public street. The city ALLOWS this as a convenience. Feel glad that you don’t live in cities like San Marino or Century City, where street parking is outlawed as “blight”. So, it’s a little hard for me to accept the tears from the folks who are all pushed out of shape because someone has parked THEIR vehicle next to YOUR home and YOU are not able to do so. Feel glad that the city allows you to park at all.
David – I have no problem with someone parking on my street, and in fact my neighbors were very considerate leaving a space for my vehicle.
What got my goat was the price I had to pay for the relative of a neighbor to park their work truck. IMO big work trucks should be parked at the work location, not in a relatively quiet neighborhood.
Since most people who can afford construction on their houses also drive to the grocery, the marketing is backfiring by pushily denying them a spot.
I doubt I’d want to hire someone who felt such need to aggressively promote themselves. The aggression may show up again when you get your final bill.
Dear no bpb. Get over it. It’s public parking. Anyone can park wherever they want. There is plenty of parking so stop being greedy ,lazy and selfish. So what if you have to walk a little more from your car. It’s healthy.
ha ha! wow. what an asshole. for all you know i could be disabled or just had knee surgery and can’t walk far. you know me so well!! as you were.
If you are disabled or just had knee surgery you should simply go and get a disabled placard and use the handicap parking spot in the lot across from good life instead of being a big whiner.The world works in a certain way and if you open your eyes you just might just see it. Since you are unaware of this simple remedy I will assume you are crying wolf on this disabled idea of yours.
I don’t own a car so it doesn’t affect me either way, but the practice in question appears to be illegal:
Click to access o0224-02.pdf
It doesn’t seem to get enforced though, so it’s a clever way to get free advertising.
SMELLY MEL’S — Yeah, that was what was called the Smelly Mel’s law because a plumber named Smelly Mel’s used to park on an overpass very visible along 101 as traffic passed under it. If I’m not mistaken it was around Hospital Curve. I thought it was clever, but someone got all pissed off about it and thus another law was born.
Sorry, but big ass work vehicles need to be parked at the company office, not taking up valuable real estate in a small neighborhood.
I have a box truck but its for personal usage. I even store my motorcycles in it so as to not take up more parking spaces on santa marina and elsie. I continually get the dpt 72 hr notices. How can you tell who is commercial and who is not. I believe there is a good saying about people who assume…
LEGALLY a commercial vehicle is a vehicle bearing commercial plates. Commercial plates use the sequence NLNNNNN or NNNNNLN (where N indicates a number and L is a letter). Some vehicles such as pickup trucks are automatically registered as commercial and given commercial plates unless you tell them it’s a passenger vehicle. I know a private school that has a bus with regular non-commercial vehicle plates because it is not used commercially. So, the type of vehicle (as long as it’s under a certain weight) is considered commercial ONLY if it is registered as commercial and has commercial plates.
There is a woman who leaves similar notes on the south side of Bernal. We parked Friday evening and received a threatening note on Sunday morning (we were going to work on Monday morning so we would have been within the 72 hours). I watched her leave the note on our car which was legally parked in front of our house. We have no ownership over that spot but I mention it because clearly, we were not bothered by an “abandoned” car in front and she was trolling cars at random. I called 311 to ask is this really a “she said, we said” scenario. The dispatcher explained that those posts aren’t real documentation and that DPT cannot just show up to cite or tow a car which is legally parked. DPT would have to note the 72 hours themselves before issuing a ticket. So far, seems to be true.
correct. basically in order to get someone towed or fined they will typically will have had to park there for 6+ days. 3 days for you to notice and call DPT, DPT comes out then starts counting the hours. So, really no one wins.
You are very right about the legality of these passive aggressive notes. The dpt lady that was putting the 72 hr notice on my truck called these people retired lookie loos with nothing better to do with their lives than harass their neighbors. We need to find out who they are and publicly humiliate them till they stop.
Wow, really? Publicly humiliate them?
Yes, these people are annoying. But are they really harming you by having DPT give you a 72hr notice? If you get the notice, move your car within 72hrs and you don’t have a problem.
I’m not saying our neighbors are using the city’s meager resources well. I’m not saying you’re parking in violation of the law. I’m not saying I agree with the note-leavers at all.
But I am saying that your attitude is as toxic as your neighbors’. I dislike your response as much as I dislike your neighbor’s actions. From what I’m reading, you guys deserve each other, sheesh.
FEEL SORRY for those unfortunate folks whose only high point in their day is leaving nasty notes on people’s cars. Thankfully, where I live we don’t have such nasty folks, but then we’re all renters and we haven’t been holed up in our homes for 20 years hiding under our beds, worried about people taking parking spaces…
Maybe KRON’s Stanley Roberts and his crack investigative team for the People Behaving Badly segment should be alerted to this latest Bernal outrage.
Stanley Roberts strikes me more as the sort of person that’d be on the side of the note-leaver.
Where is the camera located? Are there more cameras? Asking because my truck has been damaged while parked on Elsie around the same time I also started being harrased with SFMTA stickers and the passive agressive notes in question here. It’s a terrible suspicion, but maybe that person is not that passive afterall. I also saw potentially fake SFMTA notes on my vehicle. The kind that says “Your vehicle is parked in violation of the law …”. AFAIK the real version of this note only occurs with tire markers, because SFMTA needs proof before they can tow. In my case there were no markers and the not was posted within a few hours after I parked in the spot.
I guess I’m curious as to what is the point when harassment of neighbors crosses the line to illegal? This person is doggedly pursuing this vein with repeated efforts to intimidate. Ultimately her/’their’ claims don’t amount to much since DPT has to do their due diligence but this woman is relentless in her parking bullying tactics. If she is leaving false notes pretending to be DPT and making fake chalk lines, etc. she is in violation of *something*. I don’t think this is an older “lookie-loo” as suggested, as she is walking the streets at night doing this. Someone knows who she is – I hope they speak up!
i think leaving a car in a spot for a long time- ie: more than 72 hours is selfish. if you have a car and don’t use it – you need to garage it or sell it.
Wow. Use your car as much as possible. Its people like you that are ruining this planet. Some people have cars to get away on the weekends and ride bikes during the week. Sorry we don’t drive and consume as much as you, you life killer.
+1 for Wow. Jaime, that’s crazy. I ride my bike to work, sometime I don’t need to drive for 4 or 5 days.
Well, if you insist on having a car that you seldom use you should pay for a garage to keep it. I mean, heck, you don’t put your refrigerator on the street or your sofa or your bed, so why should you put your car there for an extended period if you don’t use it?
The 72 hour rule is a compromise, and it’s a great way to flag people who abuse public streets by storing otherwise unused vehicles.
At one point, Chicken John said he had “about a dozen” cars parking on city streets. It took him a couple hours every couple days to move them all. Last I heard he was going to lease some space along Bayshore to store them. Storing your cars off-street is a very good idea, if for no other reason than keeping your car from getting scratched up by tree branches and neighbors who don’t know how to park without dinging your car.
Dear david kaye. Since you are well off enough to not only be able to own, since I figure you do, rent a garage or have a house with a garage, how about helping everyone else on cortland, elsie,santa marina and.the rest of bernal find a garage.that.is at all affordable in this, of the most expensive cities in the world, find a garage. You are not using your head. Simple, stupid answers are never the cure to a complex situation. Ps do ya have garage for rent cause I know a few people looking…
Oh yes, please let me know of any garages available in walking distance. Have been looking a for a while.
There can be creative solutions. Are all the parking spaces used at Big Lots or in the apartment complex? Maybe a person can approach management and ASK. The worst you’d get is a no. How about the parking area next door to Chicken’s warehouse? Rent a space there? Maybe? Or a school parking lot? For a time when I lived in Bernal I rented a space in the Burger King parking lot. I’m not sure if that was “official” or whether the manager just pocketed the money, but I did this for about 6 months. NO, not everybody is going to find a place, but THAT is not the issue. The smart ones will find ways and the others, well….
I do not own a home; I used to but the expense of upkeep and property taxes made being a renter way more attractive to me. That and having to spend $15,000 on a sewer line after a willow tree wrapped its roots around the old one.
As for parking, where I live now I have my own off-street parking, as do my housemates. And yes, I live in San Francisco. I just simply listed my priorities and rented a place where my various needs were met. It took me awhile, but I was able to do it. I suggest that instead of whining people might take after me and plan your lives a little bit instead of stumbling around complaining about things.
Better yet david kaye. How about suggest to the people who live in this area that are parking complainers to go get a garage. The people who get these 72 hr notices aren’t leaving notes or otherwise being passive and or aggressive. This problem lies in people who undeserving feel entitled to public property that we all pay taxes to maintain and use.
YEARS AND YEARS AGO when I was involved in the Northwest Bernal Alliance, a suggestion was endorsed by many in the membership: People who have garages should clean them out and park their cars there. This brought out fits of outrages along the lines of, “Why should *I* park my car off-street when my neighbors don’t because they don’t have garages?” There was so much self-righteous indignation that the idea was dropped fast.
Ps david kaye… I like most of your posts. You sound more intelligent than most, outside of the use your car as much as possible thing or get a garage. I’m pretty sure that just slipped out
I don’t think I’m more intelligent than most, but I approach these topics as a debater or as a game player would, and that’s this way: I don’t take it personally. I try to isolate my personal feelings from the facts of the matter. Taking things personally only gets in the way of finding reasonable solutions to problems.
GAMES: By the way, I’m going to be on NPR, either on “Morning Edition” or “All Things Considered” in a few days, discussing game playing by adults, the reasons why games are important, and their effect on a community. One of the reporters heard about my long-running group, SF Games (just celebrating its 19th anniversary a few days ago), and flew out here from DC. We had a GREAT conversation. I understand this will be a series of 3 or 4 segments over the span of a few days. –David Kaye
No more car discrimination? It is so sad to see how persecuted car owners are. Free parking. Parking and moving violations rarely enforced. Cars first at intersections regardless of that antiquated crosswalk thing. Cars parked down the middle of streets on Sunday and on sidewalks every day. No wonder people feel pressured to give up their cars. I wonder if the aclu is working on this?
I think you missed the “Garage It” part of the statement.
We have a problem. On Nevada St. The woman across the street thinksno one should park in front of her house for any length of time and will ring your bell requesting you move your car, if you don’t she calls you a bad neighbor. Must be nice to have so much time on your hands. There are a lot of organizations you can volunteer .
You have a right to park your car in front of your house as long as you want. I wish someone would but a flyer on my car telling me to move it.
I agree that parking in Bernal is easier than other places and that this person needs a sense of priority and less entitlement. But let me say that parking is 50 x harder than it was 10 years ago. I would really like to see ALL of us adjust our priorities and think about allternative and public transportation. Maybe some of us multi car families could downsize a car or two. The answer starts with us. Sooner or later people will be faced with parking situations similar to North Beach.
Unfortunately, we have a car-worshipping mayor and it’s enough trouble getting Muni to stop cutting their service, even as their funding increases. I don’t know how we’re ever going to get improved transit service through Bernal.
When more people ride public transit. Public transit will become more responsive. In ny stock brokers, students, lawyers and housekeepers all ride buses and subways. In sf wealthy people drive. Techies take private buses. The majority of riders left are marginal power holders. I’m generalizing of course. There are other differences. One is that ny does not make free parking easy. Another is that they set up public transit infrastructure long ago. Too bad sf tore up all those street car lines. That would be an amazing way to get around today. Think amsterdam.
Tell that to my neighbor who works on cars and has 4 of them at a time.
I feel for you. Is your neighbor a hobbiest or making money? L aws probably apply to this somewhere. Is she or he reasonable? Compromise?
We also have a neighbor who is a mechanic. Working on several cars at a time. All parked on the street. And they leave orange cones in their spots when they leave so people won’t park there. It’s actually hilarious. Luckily we don’t need the space so it doesn’t really bother us. We also get people parking and blocking our garage a lot. We’ve called and gotten them ticketed. May seem cranky, but we can’t get out of our garage, so you gotta do what you gotta do.
It is illegal to work on cars on the street, call DPT. Also this “mechanic” is probably unlicensed, no liability insurance and does not deal with his hazardous wastes legally or correctly as being unlicensed he is effectively UNregulated. Report him to the City. The Health Dept and the States Bureau of Auto Repair want to know about these shadetrees.
Bernalwood: can you make comments pages have a “Notify me…” button without having to post a comment?
Sorry, I cannot.
All this discussion makes me miss NYC even more. Not owning a car and having good public transportation is so relaxing.
I need a Manhattanwood blog where I can complain about the IT workers being displaced by all the bankers.
Agree.
Parking… such energy!
Here’s how I handled a recent situation: A guy parked his car in the space in front of my/my neighbor’s house at a time when my neighbor had a car parked across their driveway and some of the space in question. The fellow pulled his car back as far as he could, and it was legally parked. However, our street is narrow and our neighbor across the street parks cars across their driveway, so it was actually rather tricky to get our car in and out of our garage… for the six days this fellow parked there.
My wife left a gently worded note requesting that in the future he park his car just a little bit further back (and she left our address, so it wasn’t anonymous). I left a note where I printed out the SFMTA web page that references the 72 hour limit, with words to alert him to the city code.
I didn’t want to threaten — I wanted this person to be informed of the rules. I’ve subsequently noticed this same car further down the block, and I’m guessing he’s a neighbor I haven’t met and doesn’t use his car much, so he moves it to avoid street cleaning but not every 72 hours.
My orientation on this issue is this: we have a set of rules (you can’t block a driveway, you can’t park for more than 72 hours in the same spot), but as long as people park within those rules, YOU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING YOU CAN COMPLAIN ABOUT. Well, maybe a little. You can WISH that things were different, but you can’t complain to the person who parks their car on “your” street, in “your” spot if they follow the rules without you being overly self-entitled and possessive of public land.
+1
Facts; common sense; civility; gentleness; proportional response; lack of vengeful, blood-lusting rage?
What the hell’s wrong with you? LOL
Seriously, though, this issue is one of the best examples of ANONYMITY being a major factor in the escalation of conflict. 1) It prevents any attempt at dialogue between the note leaver and the note recipient. 2) It allows people to be nasty, petulant and unproductive.
Probably unsolvable. Which is sad.
Well, considering dialog, I’m not sure what you are trying to say. Are you saying that my example (leaving non-anonymous, factual notes rather than angry ones) is “this issue”, or are you saying that about the whole thread?
Sorry for the confusion. I was in a hurry. By “the issue” I meant SF parking in general.
You seem to have handled your problem appropriately, in a civil manner. Very laudable.
But because people are able to be anonymous when leaving notes, it allows for terrible, unproductive behavior. (If you can’t sign your name to it, you probably shouldn’t leave it.)
And I don’t see any way to solve the problem of people being able to be anonymous. When I first read the headline of this thread, I was excited that maybe a coward had been outed…
Another thing: it’s too bad there isn’t a publicly accessible database of car license plate registrations. (Although I’m sure there are many reasons there shouldn’t be.) I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, and think “If there was only some way to find out who owns this car that is slightly blocking my driveway, I’m sure they’d be glad to come move it rather than get ticketed or towed.”
Ah, yes, if only there were an easy way to facilitate conversation between the owner of an inanimate, parked-car and the person inconvenienced by it.
I use the word inconvenience quite deliberately: most of the angst here seems to be about how one person is inconveniencing another. Well, welcome to life in the city. Can’t we all just get along?
There is limited street parking in our neighborhood, especially on Winfield, and adding a garage to a home that doesn’t have one costs $100-200K. The last time I spoke to an MTA person who came out to tow a car that eventually got reported only after it had been parked there a couple of weeks, she told me that the owner lived about a 15-20 minute walk away, in other words, they parked out of their own neighborhood and went on vacation. Ever notice how during the summer there seems to be more parking, is this because people park here and take BART to school? Maybe we need to look at permit parking to discourage people dumping their cars here.
Permits address a small piece of a very large problem and put money in the city’s pocket –okay with me. Permits are not a sustainable or high impact solution to the problem. Look at north beach. Bottomline: There are too many cars owned by bernal residents and not enough parking spaces. I don’t think creating parking spaces is the answer either. It just encourages the car dependent culture. Bernal residents are creative thinkers. Let’s challenge our own assumptions and what we consider needs. We might even find we like our lives and city better with fewer cars.
We definitely should challenge our assumptions. Dogmatic belief is unproductive. Cars are not ruining the planet. Bikes are not saving the planet. Extreme, dogmatic positions based on feelings rather than facts are basically religion. There are people who need and use their cars. There are people who prefer to use bikes.
I’d love to have this discussion, but it is vast and intricate, and seems off the topic of cranky anonymous note leavers…
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I have received one of these infamous Yellow 72 hr warning recently because of this Angry Clown in a maroon truck, on Ripley.
One clarification of the unpleasant Yellow Notices is that although you must move the car after 72 hours, they also want you to move your car 500ft away.
This particular spot that is relatively easy to park in usually has parking available whereas anything 500 ft away from there does not. This means not only can I repark my car there when I come home from work with my car, but I can’t even use the next 4, 10, 15 spaces that might be open that are near my home, for another 72 hrs.
Now i’m on to you Clown on Ripley. Now that I know who you are, I will be reporting your Purple Clown Ride and Mercedes. You’ve had me towed once when my father died and I shockingly left home when my brother picked me up because I was to distraught to drive 60 miles.
No way to treat a neighbor!!! Put your little notepad away and get a life. Find something to do that serves the community not only to self serve yourself. Yes, recently you’ve left Clown Mobile Parked in your driveway for 5 days until I called you in. That’s pretty hypocritical!
But the “clown” is absolutely RIGHT. You must repark every 72 hours and at 500 feet or more away. Look at it this way: You’re parking your PRIVATE VEHICLE on a public street. What if you decided to park your old refrigerator on a public street because you just didn’t want to get rid of it? Or your barbecue? Same thing. The city is NOT obligated to give you a free place to park, and many cities such as Century City and San Marino do NOT allow any parking on their streets.
what exactly is your point idiot?
That’s are pretty far fetched scenarios, frankly an ignorant way to interpreting a pretty mute point.
Take your interpretations elsewhere.
I moved from Bernal–my home for 15 years–to Oakland 3 years ago and left Bernalwood before that. Imagine my surprise to receive a notice that someone commented on a thread from 2014. Imagine my equal surprise that nothing has changed with the new Bernal elite, fighting over parking spaces. One would think you found something else to channel that energy into.
No interpretation needed. The law is quite clear that you must move your car every 72 hours and at least 500 feet away. And the word is “moot”, not “mute”.