How many San Franciscans are "misplacing" their cars?

Having a car in San Francisco, for many, means mastering the art of city parking — and what a fitful practice it can be.

Finding a spot to rest your metal steed is hard enough — then add in hills, time limits and one-way streets. Street sweeping schedules prompt weekly nightmares. A man named Carlos, who works at The City’s impound lot in SoMa, has heard me cry more than once.

According to data from The City’s DataSF database, since 2018, 2,376,891 citations were issued for street cleaning violations, for a total of $190,145,764 in fines. In the same time frame, there have been 450 police incident reports of vehicles impounded.

This year alone, San Francisco 311 has received 11,866 requests to tow vehicles that were blocking driveways, according to DataSF’s 311 case log.

But for a fraction of city car owners, the rigmarole of S.F. roads culminates in a different phenomenon. Since 2018, 272 incident reports have been filed for cars deemed “misplaced.”

Not everyone that’s found themselves in this “Dude, Where’s My Car”-type predicament files a report — like Jacob K., an S.F. resident in his twenties who stepped outside one day and realized he wasn’t sure where he’d parked. He requested his last name not be used to avoid being “perceived as ‘loses-his-car guy’ if someone were to Google me.”

“So I do not have a garage parking spot, I park out on the street. And so what that leads to is just on a regular basis, having to kind of shuffle play musical chairs with the parking spots,” he said. “For a short minute, it was a little bit of a heart attack moment where I thought, did my car get towed? What happened?”

He was able to find his vehicle in 20 minutes by wandering the streets of his neighborhood. He chalks the situation up to a busy schedule, with “moving the car at times as an afterthought.”

“It’s a situation where at 7:30 a.m. you jump out of bed and go move the car, because you remember it’s street sweeping day and because you want to avoid the ticket. It’s almost $100,” he said.

District 3, comprising North Beach, Nob Hill and the Financial District, had 41 incident reports and led the pack in misplaced vehicles reported to the San Francisco Police Department. Districts 5, 6 and 8 — NoPa/Hayes Valley, SoMa, and Castro/Noe Valley areas — followed closely, with 37, 36 and 35 reports filed, respectively. The district with the fewest claims was 11, Oceanview and the Excelsior, with just five vanishing vehicles.

But it comes with the territory, said K, “That’s just part of city life, frequently shuffling your car around.”

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