While the supersized plans for redeveloping the Polk Gulch funeral home site at 1123 Sutter Street, along with the adjacent three-story garage at the corner of Sutter and Larkin, were approved last year, the ground for the now 236 unit development has yet to be broken.
At the same time, the corner parking garage at 1101 Sutter Street, which was to be redeveloped into residential units and ground floor commercial space, has just been renovated, carved out of the redevelopment plans, and is now on the market, either for sale or lease, with the marketing materials for the garage noting a “growing lack of parking supply” in San Francisco, with “strong demand for more covered parking facilities,” driven by “ever-growing EV [and] autonomous vehicle parking / storage needs,” a key trend with implications that extend beyond new developments and commercial garages.
We’ll keep you posted and plugged-in.
I agree that there’s a “ever-growing EV” charging station need for human drivers, but it seems to me that autonomous vehicles should just drive themselves to Daly City or less expensive points south when they need to park or charge. I’d expect that the engineers at Waymo and Cruise would have worked out the cost/benefit and calculated that parking and charging in S.F. isn’t worth it (although I haven’t heard at all where those two companies park their robotaxis; since we’re in the early stages of the technology’s deployment perhaps there is some benefit to local parking that I am unaware of).
I have never seen a Cruise or Waymo on the freeway. My guess is they are not approved for Interstate freeways, or are not yet trained well enough on them.
This is indeed a key trend. I wonder if a deal could be struck with some of the big box retail companies like Target (Geary/Masonic) to install chargers on their parking lots for overnight usage when the lot is closed. Seems like better utilization. Waymo/Cruise probably need their own private space for maintenance and operations team members, though.
Waymo doesn’t operate on freeways because it is ultra-easy-mode and they don’t learn anything from it. Google, before they spun off Waymo, was shuttling employees to work up and down freeways in self-driving cars 10 years ago.
I see the Cruise cars parked in a garage on Harrison Street just east of 4th Street in San Francisco.
Comparatively, industrial lots in the Bayview aren’t that much no? Way I has a facility there
So: converting a parking garage into a … parking garage??
I’m guessing we had to await the arrival of AI to come up with this idea.
A parking garage with an EV charger at every space would make a lot of sense for those who can afford it. I have a charger at my parking space and it makes an EV a pure pleasure from a logistics perspective. A friend is on the HOA board of a large complex and they are struggling with an EV charging plan: no way to put a charger at every space, but the adoption of EVs is accelerating.