Parking isn't so bad in SF, unless you're trying to go to the same place that everyone else is on a weekend. Oops, that may mean you, right?

I don't often use parking garages myself, but if you're trying to go to, say, Chinatown on a weekend, they're not a bad idea, especially if you've got a big group in the car to split the costs.

If you want to get by knowing about only one parking garage, this is the one you should probably know about: As you're driving north on Kearney street (which is a one-way street), just after Clay Street, and just before a concrete bridge that crosses the road, you can hang a left into The Portsmouth Plaza Garage. Prices run around $7.50 for 3 hours (though a bunch of restaurants in the area will "validate" your parking ticket, and get you 2 hours for free). Anyway, this puts you in the middle of Chinatown, not far from North Beach, in the neighborhood where it's probably the hardest to find a parking space.

There are some pretty substantial parking garages scattered around in Soma (e.g. on Mission between 3rd and 5th), but I bet you won't need them much, if you just look around a bit for on street parking.

But read the parking regulations *really* carefully. This is revenue for the city, so remember that they're out to get you. Notice that in Soma, most of the "street cleaning zones" start at midnight. The gimmick works like this: say you're going out on a Wednesday night, you park somewhere, glancing at the sign. It says something about no parking on Thursday, so you don't worry about it. But technically, Thursday starts at midnight on Wednesday, so just when the club you're in is warming up, the brown shirts are racing around slapping tickets on the windshields.