The answer; it's endlessly amusing.
Take, for example, the major story from Wednesday.
San Francisco supervisors expressed shock Wednesday over a report that parking meters are pulling in just a fraction of the revenue that might be expected in a city where competition for space to tuck away one's car can be cutthroat.
"There's something seriously wrong here," said Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, who called for the hearing. "We've got to get an analysis. We've got to understand what's going on here. It's beyond credulity."
McGoldrick was responding to a report from Board of Supervisors Budget Analyst Harvey Rose that shows San Francisco's roughly 23,000 meters collect on average between $2.61 and $5.59 a day.
Surprisingly, the lowest collection rates were recorded in the core of downtown San Francisco, where drivers run the gantlet to find a legal parking space and where meters cost as much as $3 an hour.
Of course, one wonders what their answer will be when confronted with this.
San Francisco has about 23,000 coin-fed parking meters, while city residents hold about 90,000 permanent and temporary handicap parking placards, issued by the state Department of Motor Vehicles, allowing them to park for free, said Judson True, spokesman for the city's Municipal Transportation Agency.
That's about four placards for every meter.
And, to put a nice bit of icing on the Supervisors's wacky cake:
More than 450 City Hall aides, police officers and others in San Francisco have had passes for free parking in city-owned garages -- a perk that could add up to more than $1 million a year.
And many of those passes may have been distributed in violation of the city's charter and policies to encourage transit use.
True, it does get annoying on occasion. But if there's one thing that the move to San Francisco has taught me, it's that the universe has an enormous self-correcting mechanism when it comes to nitwits.
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