>Parking in Downtown Sacramento

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After living and working in San Francisco for 10 years, I know how to park on a city street with confidence…until I moved to Sacramento.  The same rules in the city do not seem to apply here.

In San Francisco, you can park in a white zone when a building is closed.  So after 6 PM on a weekday and pretty much all day on the weekends, you could park, for free in a passenger loading zone.  I remember people stalking parking spots in front of the Gap building.  Waiting there for the clock to turn so they could turn off their cars and go to Gordon Biersch.  Or maybe that was just me.

Here in Sacramento, I have no idea if the same rule applies.  Because I’m a cheapskate, I am afraid to just blindly test the white zone.  Also, if said zone is in front of a government building, I don’t need to come back from happy hour only to find a news van and a phalanx of police officers surrounding my vehicle.

So, I was trying to untangle the byzantine parking regulations for the capital of California, when I saw the words “Prisoner of War” next to things like “Curb” “Crosswalk” and “Snow Areas”.

Of course, I clicked through to see how that term could possibly be related to parking…

So veterans with special license plates don’t have to pay at meters.  That’s pretty awesome, California.  This isn’t a Sacramento law.  This is a state wide law.

I’m still not sure about the passenger loading zone situation.  I do know that downtown Sacramento has free parking for everyone after 4:30 PM on weekdays through Christmas.  Holiday Happy Hour, anyone?