[vineyardmike]

He will not realistically get his window broken unless he parks in a few bad areas AND has a lot of clear valuables in the car and gets really unlucky. It’s just not as common as people make it sound.

You’ll be fine street parking at golden gate. You’ll be fine street parking at Buena Vista. You’ll be fine street parking near Dolo. It’s fine, I do it all the time.

Don’t park in (or go to) the tenderloin, and be cautious around the fisherman wharf (but plenty of tourists park here daily with no issue).

I would suggest visiting the Presidio, it has a nice parking lot if you’ll drive. Alternatively , Sutro Baths and the parks around it make for great views of the water and the bridge. It’s a bit hilly but it’s a great urban hike.

If you don’t want to drive our public transit is great. Golden Gate Park is serviced by the Muni N line which is very easy to take. The N will take you pretty close to Haight Ashbury neighborhood (very fun, unique for a few hours) and Buena Vista park too. Mission Dolores park is nice and serviced by the J line. Then it’s just a short walk to the mission for great Mexican food. Get a burrito.

I’ll just add that the worst parts of the city are the parts with offices (downtown, SOMA). Go away from where tech people go for the best experiences.

[mattnewton]

> You’ll be fine street parking at golden gate. You’ll be fine street parking at Buena Vista. You’ll be fine street parking near Dolo. It’s fine, I do it all the time.

I do too, and wish this was true there are “car safe” areas, but it’s really just best advice to not worry about it in the city. the Muni is cheap, Uber/Lyft are very convenient, and I just yesterday filmed a car smash and grab on Fulton street, in broad daylight by Alamo square. A lovely group of tourists were a few feet from their car when it happened. Thieves are very brazen and will be wherever tourists are, all it takes is to leave a coat or something in the back seat they think might be covering something up. I love this city, and violent crime is basically nonexistent, but property crime is very common and not prosecuted.

[vineyardmike]

> property crime is very common and not prosecuted.

Honestly, and perhaps controversially, I think this is not a super bad thing. Yeah getting your stuff stolen sucks, but at a society level it’s not a big deal.

I had my car broken into in Seattle in a hotel parking lot. The hotel staff cleaned up the glass, but otherwise didn’t tell us. When we found the car, we notified the police - in Seattle this means filling out a form on their website. They automatically email you a police report to forward to insurance. I’m very confident no one in SPD was involved. We had insurance money that day and the car fixed a few days later. Between the window repair and the items stolen was probably ~$1500 in damage. But the cost of a police officer to spend hours investigating (and still probably not catching anyone) would make it prohibitively expensive to run a police force. Unless you want to put up cameras everywhere and staff the government to track people through them, you basically can’t prevent petty crime in cities. Even that may not have caught our thief. It’s just too expensive to police everything, and with so much police corruption, I’m not sure I’d prefer 3x the force at 1/3 the salary.