For being one of the most hated men in San Francisco, Trevor Adams is a really nice guy.

Of course, it doesn’t seem like it when he’s slapping a pricey ticket on your windshield for parking at an expired meter or stopping in a bus zone. As one of the city’s 275 parking control officers — the term “meter maid” is so passe — he’s reminded on a daily basis that people really, really don’t like him.

After all, he’s the easily identifiable symbol of a packed city where it can be a headache-inducing venture just to drive to your destination, find a parking space and afford the small ransom the city charges for it. If, as some drivers say, San Francisco is waging a war on cars, Adams is on its front line.

“I’ve been hit with cars, had my foot run over, been spit on,” the 33-year-old said with total calm. “There’s a lot of swearing. I’ve been called every name in the book.”

One irate woman returned to her car to find Adams writing a ticket, jumped inside and sped off, running over his foot. A man who was ticketed for stopping in a bus zone followed Adams, cut him off, got out of his car and started shaking Adams’ little white Interceptor vehicle. The man demanded that Adams get out so he could beat him up, screaming obscenities the whole time. I asked Adams what the man yelled, which proved a pointless question since none of it is printable in a family newspaper.

“My heart was pounding,” Adams recalled. “I’m thinking he’s going to break my window any second.”

Adams pressed his vehicle’s emergency button to call police, who quickly arrested the belligerent man. Adams also carries pepper spray, though he rarely uses it.

It’s not even just people receiving a ticket who have nasty words for him. “It’s mainly people in passing, just who see me out there doing my job, yelling obscenities, telling me to get a real job,” he said.

Asked whether those screamers are more likely to be a particular age, gender or race, Adams said no. San Franciscans of all types hold certain shared beliefs: The only acceptable temperature is between 60 and 75 degrees, the Giants are our religion and parking control officers are not good people.

“I’ve been cursed at by old ladies,” Adams said, shrugging his shoulders.

But after tagging along with Adams for part of his shift on a recent morning, I began to see past the thick stack of tickets just waiting to ruin somebody’s day.

Adams is passionate about his job, and he’s kind about it. Yes, he handed out many tickets up and down Chestnut Street in the Marina. But he also said he’d void one when John Tudal, owner of Tudal Winery, returned to his black Range Rover to find a $71 ticket for parking at an expired meter.

Tudal explained that he had tried to pay via an app on his phone, but had inadvertently skipped the last step. (“I’m a Luddite, a country boy!” Tudal said.) He showed his phone to Adams, who told him how to use the app properly next time. There was some hand-shaking and back-slapping, and everybody left happy.

Elizabeth Lomeli, a caregiver for elderly people, happened to walk by and said she doesn’t hold any ill will toward parking control officers.

“He’s just trying to make a living,” she said. “You just have to read the signs carefully. Read the signs, that’s the key!”

Adams grew up in the Western Addition, the son of a stay-at-home mom and a disabled veteran. His identical twin brother is an elevator mechanic, and their younger sister is a cosmetologist. Adams graduated from Washington High and followed his cousin into working as a parking control officer at age 23.

He now lives in Richmond with his boyfriend, who’s in the Coast Guard, and their two dogs, Ava and Sylvester. Parking control officers now start at $51,740 a year and make $66,664 after seven years.

Asked whether he thinks it’s true that San Francisco is waging a war on cars, Adams said no. His employer, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, agrees. The agency says the city has 10,478 registered vehicles per square mile — the highest density of cars of any city in the country. A parking lot big enough to hold all of them would be twice the size of Golden Gate Park.

To Adams, that’s crazy. He said if he lived in the city, he wouldn’t own a car.

“I’d belong to two car shares, have the Lyft app and a bus pass,” he said. “There are a lot of options to get around.”

As a mom whose older kid’s elementary school is in one neighborhood, younger kid’s preschool is in another and workplace is in a third, I can say there aren’t always good options for avoiding your car. But point taken.

The SFMTA also says there are 443,283 publicly accessible parking spaces in San Francisco. With an average length of 17 feet, SFMTA says that if you lined up all those parking spaces end to end, they’d stretch more than 1,400 miles — longer than the West Coast of the United States.

If there are that many parking spaces, why is it so hard to find one?

Adams said the city’s traffic would be even more nightmarish without parking control officers.

“It would be complete and utter chaos, even worse than it is now,” he said.

He added that he and the others often serve as the very first of the city’s first responders, regularly calling 911, using their vehicle’s fire extinguishers and responding to car crashes.

So how does he do good work while fending off all the ire directed at him? Two words: “Tough skin.”

“If I let everybody get my blood pumping and steam coming out of my ears and everything, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you,” he said. “I’d be in a crazy house.”

Instead, he’s just on the crazy streets of San Francisco.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Tuesdays and Fridays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf