San Francisco has been pushing a hard line anti-car agenda, while making no noticeable improvements to transit. MUNI is a disaster being held hostage by unions. Bending to environmentalists to not address legitimate need for parking. Inefficient responses to groups like Critical Mass that breed resentment against bikes. Refusal to address the vagrant problems resulting in crap covered sidewalks. etc.

"a hard line anti-car agenda"

Seriously? The city has almost half a million parking spaces, nearly all of which are free of charge. There are no congestion charges.

"Inefficient responses to groups like Critical Mass that breed resentment against bikes"

As opposed to the Critical Mass that the car drivers stage every single day at 4:30pm? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAO20jJHNuI

Ultimately, the best way to root-cause a policy issue is to follow the money. Someone is making money from a lack of governance.

When all viable candidates for a position are already left of center, the only way to shine is to seem more-progressive and out liberal the other guy.

As evidenced by the problems on the right currently - the biggest danger is that as we keep creeping to the extreme left, the "far out nutjobs" are only a tiny step away and seem almost reasonable by comparison.

They might just change this and start charging but that's a pretty stupid idea. Free market is not an answer to everything.

Right now, "free parking" is a tax on everyone actually living in the city. They pay more for living because prime space is given away for free to store heaps of steel on it. Moreover, building regulations require new projects to provide parking spots proportional to the number of units, even when many city dwellers no longer own a car. That drastically increases development costs in cities that are starved for housing.

The problem here is one of rationing. There are a limited number of spots; who gets them?

In the current situation, the spaces are free/subsidized, but you pay instead by driving in circles. That's a big waste of time and adds to traffic congestion. Maybe that's more "fair" in some sense, but that doesn't make it good.

The app in question does either nothing or very little to help ration. It allows people who really need to park, and have the money to pay for it, to be more certain that they will get a space, which I guess is something. But it creates so many bad incentives that it's making the problem worse, not better.

The city is in a better position to create market incentives, because they can charge for the entire duration that you're in the space, not just the moment you happen to park. That means people would have no reason to camp out in a space waiting for the price to go up, which means more spaces will be available for useful purposes. It saves time and congestion, but perhaps loses out on some definitions of "fairness".

Any other ideas?

I'm not even sure it's more "fair" - as you said, you're still paying. I suppose a part of the cost (time wasted) is sort of indexed by income...

Personally, I think we’d all be better off if American cities were friendlier to pedestrians, cyclists, and buses, and stopped catering so heavily to automobiles. Devoting huge amounts of space to free/cheap street parking is incredibly expensive and inefficient, compared to just about any other use.

Not to be too pedantic but ... the roads in SF were built long before the car was invented. Think about it, if SF were built _for_ cars, why would it be at the end of a peninsula so cars have to cross bridges to get to it? SF was built so that it was easy to access by sea from ships. Cars came much, much later and the issues with parking, etc... really stem from the city not being in a very good location vis a vis cars. I agree that roads are a public good but I think they should be used to provide the greatest economic benefit which, in my opinion, is not to get commuters into the city.

I'd be seriously reconsidering plans to do anything where the parking was that expensive.