Jeepers, sweepers: Peeved driver not paying this ticket
Michael Valmonte found himself in a frustrating situation familiar to many San Francisco drivers when his car was ticketed during streetsweeping hours — after workers had already cleaned the curb.
Twice a month, Valmonte moves his car from its usual Inner Sunset parking space and waits in his driveway for the street sweepers to pass. One morning in late September, he watched the truck trundle by before swooping back into his usual parking spot on 12th Avenue.
The retired teacher was “flabbergasted” to later find a ticket tucked in his car’s door handle.
The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency rules make it clear Valmonte was in the right. It is legal to return a car to a parking space after a street-sweeping truck has cleaned the curb, even if the posted sweeping hours have not expired, according to the agency’s policy.
Frustrated the agency did not adhere to its
rule, Valmonte said he filed an official protest in person to get the ticket dismissed three days after receiving it.
“The whole purpose of us moving our cars is for them to clean streets,” said Valmonte. “Once the street is clean, mission accomplished, you should be able to park your car there. Why wait?”
Confusion over San Francisco’s parking enforcement during streetsweeping hours is a perennial problem, prompting head-scratching and exasperation for drivers. The issue is once again coming to the fore as Bay Area traffic returns to pre-pandemic levels and as the city grapples with lost revenue from a pandemic pause in parking tickets.
Drivers who receive tickets for street sweeping after the truck has passed are allowed to protest their ticket, SFMTA spokesperson Erica Kato said in an email. The protest prompts the agency to review the incident to determine whether the citation was fair, she said.
But Valmonte said the agency never responded to his protest.
He said that when he returned in November to check the status of his protest, an SFMTA employee told him the agency had no record of the document. Valmonte said the employee admonished him for not taking a picture of the protest before submitting it.
Street cleaning tickets accounted for nearly half of the more than 1.1 million citations issued in the city this year. Drivers protested the tickets in more than 67,000 cases.
Drivers can contest citations using an online portal, by mail, on the phone or in person at the agency’s downtown customer service center, according to the SFMTA. That Valmonte filed his protest in person on paper may have added to the difficulty of tracing it.
Incensed by the agency’s bureaucratic hurdles, Valmonte refused to pay the $87 parking ticket. He instead chose to complete seven hours of community service packing groceries at the Samoan Community Development Center in Hunters Point.
“I was adamant about not paying that ticket because it’s just not right,” he said. “It is the principle of it.”
Valmonte’s wife, Felicia, wrote about his parking ticket fight on Nextdoor earlier this month, prompting a vigorous discussion on the online forum among drivers who said they had received tickets under similar circumstances.
The SFMTA said it has no record of Valmonte’s protest. Kato, its spokesperson, urged drivers to make sure citations are “indeed for street sweeping and not some other infraction such as not being more than 18 inches from the curb, facing against traffic, or something else unrelated.”
Valmonte vowed to keep raising awareness about the city’s streetsweeping parking policy among his neighbors and friends.
“I’m retired,” he said. “I’ve got nothing but time.”