Parking in San Francisco is notoriously difficult, as the 900-or-so miles of publicly available on-street parking often just don’t cut it for those in search of convenient places to leave an automobile. This dearth of free storage is particularly noticeable on Sunday mornings, when those San Franciscans who don’t worship a pagan goat god in the privacy of their own homes drive to one of the city’s many houses of worship to attend a service. As most of the churches in the city don’t have adequate parking, the congregants have landed on the neat “solution” of illegally double parking wherever they please. But now, it seems, another group has gotten wise to the double-parking game: parkgoers.

This pattern of illegal double parking is particularly bad in the Mission, and has been driving neighbors crazy for years. This is perhaps best exemplified on Dolores Street, where every Sunday morning parked cars line both sides of the street creating a narrow chute for cyclists and drivers to share. And while the neighbors complain about this illegal practice constantly, the city looks the other way to the benefit of the churchgoers.

Things have recently begun to take a turn for the interesting, as what few illegal spots there are appear to be getting snatched up by people heading to Dolores Park. And the church crowd is not having it.

As reported by CBS Bay Area:

[The dubious legality of double parking] been an ongoing argument with some who think it violates church and state separation, turning a blind eye to hundreds of $110 violations each week in deference to the religious community. And, it gets more complicated with some churchgoers saying they can’t find a place to park along those medians because of all the sunbathers at Dolores Park who have realized they can get away with double parking too.

It seems that the godless parkgoers have gotten hip to the ways of the god-fearing churchgoers, just perhaps not in the way anyone expected. Maybe a shared communion of park truffles is in order.

[Photo: SF Citizen]