Here's the Data Behind San Francisco's Illegally Painted Curb Problem

A mysterious person who illegally paints curbs red and peppers parked cars with towing-threat notes handwritten on official San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency envelopes.

Curbs that mysteriously turn red — or sometimes even pink or purple — overnight.

These are just some of the nearly 140 illegal curb-painting complaints that San Francisco residents have called in or submitted to the city’s 311 online portal from mid-June 2024 through January 2025, according to a KQED data analysis. The complaints underscore the frustration and confusion many residents experience when their neighbors take the task of curb painting into their own hands.

The complaints include terms like “fake,” “illegal, “and “unauthorized.” KQED’s analysis also identified multiple instances of repeated complaints from the same address but only counted each address once for the final tally.

Of nearly three dozen neighborhoods included in the data from 311 — the nonemergency phone number for city services — the Mission District had the highest number of complaints about illegally painted curbs, with a total of 17 over the seven-and-a-half month period.

“This morning, I found vehicles blocking my driveway again,” reads one entry. “The curb had been painted grey by someone, and now vehicles are taking the liberty of blocking my driveway. It’s getting very tiring to have to call parking enforcement on a daily basis.”

The issue of illegally painted curbs garnered citywide attention in January, when SFMTA — the agency responsible for responding to those complaints — confirmed that some curbs in the vicinity of 18th and 19th avenues and Balboa Street in the Outer Richmond District had been illegally painted overnight, in what a number of local residents presumed to be an attempt by a rogue painter to help enforce the state’s new daylighting law.

AB 413, commonly known as the “daylighting law,” went into effect in January. It allows municipalities to fine drivers for parking their cars within 20 feet of a crosswalk or 15 feet from a crosswalk bulbout. Restricting parking near intersections has been shown to reduce pedestrian crashes by 30%, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

SFMTA had planned to begin handing out citations to drivers who park in those daylighted zones — whether they were painted red or not — beginning in March, but recently walked back that plan after “community members and district supervisors shared their concerns about fairness in enforcement,” the agency said in a statement on its website.

SFMTA has already issued more than 3,000 warnings to drivers parked in daylighted spots since Jan. 1 and said it will now only ticket cars that are parked in those spots if they are also marked with red curbs.

For Marcy Chapman, a resident of the city’s Richmond District, those fake curbs added a layer of confusion in a city where parking can already be stressful and in short supply — and will soon grow even scarcer when the city begins painting over more curbs in daylighted zones.

“We don’t have a garage, so it’s a sensitive topic for us losing parking,” said Chapman, “ I just want to know if I can park and not get a ticket, you know?”

People painting over official SFMTA red zones with gray paint in order to effectively nullify an official “no parking” zone is also an issue, several people told KQED.

Tony Albert filed a complaint to 311 in early 2024 after official SFMTA-painted red zones at the intersection of Octavia and Sutter streets, near San Francisco’s Japantown, were unofficially painted over in gray.

Albert said, “The [red] paint was practically still wet” when someone painted over it.

He said 311 marked his complaint as “resolved,” even though the red zones remain grayed out.

“I have a toddler, and that’s the one crosswalk that I’m most concerned about,” said Albert, arguing that the red zones, if properly enforced, would make the intersection safer because parked cars wouldn’t block the line of sight for pedestrians.

2024 was one of San Francisco’s deadliest years on record for traffic fatalities, with 41 deaths, including 24 pedestrians, according to city data, spurring calls from pedestrian advocates for the city to implement further safety measures.

Shanan Delp, a resident of Polk Gulch, said he is also disappointed by what he considers SFMTA’s lackluster response to fake-curb complaints.

In 2020, Delp said he submitted a request for SFMTA to paint red curbs on Polk Street at the northeast corners of Filbert and Greenwich streets to improve pedestrian visibility at what he considered a dangerous intersection.

“I personally felt very unsafe crossing the street with my children,” Delp said.

The request was approved, and the city eventually painted the curbs red, but “ within weeks, they were painted over,” he said, adding that it took the city many months to finally repaint them.

“I think there are really good intentions in the SFMTA, but they’re very slow, and they don’t appear to be staffed well for solving pretty basic problems like this,” he said.

Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at UC Berkeley Law’s Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, said there is a multitude of negative impacts caused by unofficial curb painting, including public safety risks and costs to local government.

“It’s a type of vandalism that takes money to monitor and enforce. You’re asking city employees to have to double-check what was painted, what was there before, and there’s a lot of cost to that,” he said.

One possible solution to the ongoing curb color wars could be for the city to install more permanent infrastructure in those spaces, like benches, large rocks and plastic posts, said Luke Bornheimer, executive director of Streets Forward, a San Francisco advocacy group.

That would make those parking restrictions more intuitive and ensure people don’t park cars in daylighting spaces while also “reducing wasted money and resources trying to undo a vigilante’s work,” he said.

Meanwhile, officials at 311 advise people to “report colored curbs that do not have an SFMTA logo,” although in some cases, residents have stenciled their own custom-made SFMTA logo on the illegally painted curbs.

For a fee, residents can also apply to have the city paint a roughly 2-foot red zone on either side of their driveways if they meet certain criteria and need additional street clearance.

When it comes to residents painting their own curbs, SFMTA is clear: It’s completely illegal, and can land a rogue painter a fine of up to $500.

Ernst Schoen-Rene said he called 311 about four years ago to report a suspicious 20-foot-long strip of red on a curb in front of an apartment building near his house in the SoMa neighborhood.

“It was funny because SFMTA had just done a red curb around the corner, and this SFMTA stencil didn’t even look close to right,” he said. “ It isn’t particularly fair if there’s free parking and someone is illegally claiming it.”

About a week after Schoen-Rene filed his complaint, the curb was repainted gray, he said, although it was unclear who did it.

The 311 complaints also include instances in which residents claim to have received tickets from SFMTA for parking in what they later learned were fake red zones.

The number of complaints over the seven-month period of data is typical for the city, according to a 311 spokesperson. The data doesn’t, however, always indicate whether the city ultimately determined whether the reported curbs were, in fact, illegal.

SFMTA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In response to an earlier inquiry about fake curbs, SFMTA spokesperson Michael Roccaforte said in an email that the agency “would really prefer to not breathe more life into that story because our resources are stretched thin and unauthorized tampering with curb space causes a lot of confusion and headaches for both residents and our staff. We do not want for this behavior to be perpetuated.”

Among the 139 separate complaints KQED tallied over the most 7-month period, 44 were marked “invalid” or contained “insufficient information” due to a lack of contact details or photos of the allegedly illegal curb. But 95 of them were marked as “resolved” or “transferred,” indicating they were either forwarded to SFMTA’s color curb team or that more information had been requested.

In some of the resolved cases, 311’s data log indicated that a curb reported as fake was actually legitimate.

“Let caller know that there is a valid driveway red curb at that address but to send photos if he has any concerns,” one entry reads.

There will be plenty of legitimate wet red paint on city curbs over the next 18 months, as SFMTA rushes to mark daylighted zones, in accordance with the new state daylighting law — likely aware that some of their work might be quickly defaced.