North Park and City Heights are getting the brunt of parking tickets under a new law that prohibits parking too close to an intersection, a San Diego Union-Tribune analysis of parking citation data shows.
The “daylighting” law that took effect Jan. 1 prohibits parking within 20 feet of the approach side of a crosswalk in an effort to improve visibility and keep pedestrians safe. It applies whether or not curbs are painted red.
Since the city of San Diego began enforcing the law March 1, more than 13,000 citations have been issued as of Sept. 18 — many of them on residential streets around North Park, Normal Heights and City Heights, as well as in La Jolla, Pacific Beach, Golden Hill, Grant Hill, Hillcrest, University Heights and Ocean Beach.
One street in particular has become a hot spot for the parking tickets: Polk Avenue, which runs east to west through North Park and City Heights and across the 805 and 15 freeways. More than 800 citations for daylighting law violations have been issued on Polk Avenue since the spring.
Polk Avenue far exceeds other top-ticketed streets. Vista Del Mar Avenue in La Jolla follows with 300 citations and Madison Avenue in Mid-City with 280.
“It’s everywhere,” said City Heights resident Rafael Ramirez, who parked his car on Polk Avenue last week. He’s gotten two tickets since enforcement began — one in the morning and one at night — and now owes the city $240.
The city raised the citation fee from $77.50 to $117.50 a month after implementation began as part of a parking fee reform package.
According to the city’s citation data, citations worth $1.4 million in fines had been issued as of mid-September. City spokesperson Anthony Santacroce said that as of Aug. 11, the city had collected about $818,000 in revenue — not all the tickets it had issued by then had yet been paid.
While Polk Avenue is the street with the most citations, the most-ticketed intersections are in La Jolla, right by an entrance to Windansea Beach: 7000 Vista Del Mar Ave. had 75 citations and 6600 Vista Del Mar Ave. had 69.
The city says its enforcement officers are assigned to prioritize areas with metered and time-restricted zones, which can result in more officers in densely populated areas where parking demand is high.
But this isn’t always the case. In downtown San Diego, for example, despite more assigned enforcement officers, few citations have been issued. The city says this is because the area has more red curbs that signal to drivers not to park there.
The city did not respond to questions about why Polk Avenue specifically has seen so many more citations than other streets or how many enforcement officers it has patrolling Polk Avenue.
Santacroce says the city’s transportation department has evaluated more than 1,300 of the city’s 16,000 intersections, and it has painted more than 1,000 so far.
After first focusing on the city’s high-priority intersections, he says the city will now move to painting curbs as part of a more gradual process and will include the effort in the city’s capital improvement and private permit projects.
Santacroce added that the city has received many resident reports of cars illegally parked near intersections through its Get It Done! portal relating to daylighting law violations on some of the most-ticketed streets.
“Officers are expected to respond to these reports and take enforcement action when appropriate,” Santacroce said in an email. “Often, when officers respond to a report, they encounter multiple vehicles in violation at the same or nearby intersections. It would be inefficient to enforce only the reported vehicle while ignoring others in violation.”
People who live on Polk Avenue or work nearby say they’re feeling the impact of the new law. Along with frustration over the tickets themselves, they say it has only gotten harder to find street parking in the neighborhood with the new law in effect.
“We struggle with parking already as it is,” said Ruth Santos, a patient services representative at a medical clinic in City Heights.
Santos says patients are often late to their appointments as they try to find parking in the area. She commutes to work from her home in Spring Valley and says she leaves 30 to 45 minutes early to find parking nearby.
Mark Milan, who lives on the 4400 block of Polk Avenue, near where 46 citations have been issued as of Sept. 18, said that he sees the value in the new law.
Pedestrians and drivers will have an easier time seeing each other before they make a turn or cross the street, he says, if cars aren’t parked so close to the intersection.
That’s what got the community advocacy group Strong Towns San Diego interested in helping to educate drivers about it. The group is a local chapter of Strong Towns, a national organization that focuses its advocacy on housing development, pedestrian safety and curbing the influence of cars on the urban environment.
“The law has a wonderful intent,” said Haylee Rea, the founder and strategy and mobilization lead for Strong Towns San Diego. But she saw that the city wouldn’t be able to mark all the intersections red before enforcement began.
This summer, the group’s volunteers went to Kensington and Hillcrest to chalk intersections red so drivers would avoid parking there.
Using the same chalk that kids draw with on the sidewalk, they marked intersections near elementary schools — to inform drivers in areas where children are present — and near busy intersections in Hillcrest before San Diego Pride weekend in July.
Understanding that eventually the chalk would wash away, the group also posted flyers with QR codes for people to learn more. It’s now soliciting recommendations for which intersections and neighborhoods they should chalk next.
“We’re asking the community to send in locations or areas or parts of the town that they think would work best for this,” Rea said, “and then we kind of just follow where the need is greatest.”