Park on San Anselmo Avenue this week and you won't need an app, a credit card, or a plate number typed into a kiosk. Two hours, free, no fuss, the way it worked before last summer. Walk half a block into the Pine Street lot, though, and the meter is still very much running. That split, free on the street and paid thirty feet away, is not an oversight. It is what survived a costly, closely watched experiment the town ran for about three months and then reversed, and it is quietly shaping almost everything happening on the Avenue right now.
The Kiosks Came Down in September
In October 2023, San Anselmo's Town Council approved a plan to install paid parking along the Avenue, meant to enforce the existing two-hour limit and fund extra patrols through the Central Marin Police Authority. The plan finally launched on June 2, 2025, with thirteen pay stations installed along the street and in the town lots, charging $1.50 an hour on the Avenue and $1.00 an hour in the lots, all routed through a system called ParkMobile.
It did not go the way the council hoped. By late summer, CBS News and other Bay Area outlets were covering a town in open revolt against its own kiosks. On September 11, 2025, the Town Council held a special meeting and voted unanimously to repeal paid parking on San Anselmo Avenue, effective immediately. The Avenue reverted to free parking with a two-hour limit. The three municipal lots, Pine Street, Magnolia Avenue, and Creek Park, kept their meters.
What the Meters Actually Cost
The complaints were not abstract. Pat Townsley, who owns Creekside Pizza and Taproom on the Avenue, told reporters that the system was costing his restaurant roughly $1,000 a day on weeknights, not because customers minded the fee itself but because the payment process was slow enough to send people back to their cars instead of into his dining room. Frank Gomez of Wink Optics called the whole rollout bad for the town. At Sugarfoot Books, owner David Johnson found himself walking outside to help older customers work the kiosk. Duilio Valenti, who owns Valenti's, said delivery drivers were the ones most fed up, since the app-only system turned a two-minute drop-off into a multi-step chore.
None of this was really about the dollar amount. A resident who has lived here through both versions of the Avenue knows the real problem was friction: an extra ninety seconds at a machine is enough to talk yourself out of stopping at all, and San Anselmo's downtown runs on people who stop on a whim.
The Split Nobody Warns You About
Here is the part that trips people up now that the meters are gone from the street. The repeal only applied to San Anselmo Avenue itself.
| Location | Cost | Time limit |
|---|---|---|
| San Anselmo Avenue | Free | 2 hours |
| Pine Street lot | Paid | 2 or 4 hours, as marked |
| Magnolia Avenue lot | Paid | 2 or 4 hours, as marked |
| Creek Park lot | Paid | 2 hours |
Enforcement runs Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sundays are free everywhere. If you're the kind of resident who circles once for street parking and then ducks into Pine Street when nothing opens up, expect to still pay for that second stop. Employees and business owners who need to park longer than two hours can apply for a Merchant Parking Permit, which shifted this year to a calendar-year term, $25 for up to five vehicles registered to one business license, $10 for each additional permit.
The Avenue Is Still Building Around That Lesson
What makes this fall interesting is that everything the town has layered onto the Avenue since the repeal reads like a direct response to what the meters got wrong. Live on the Avenue keeps the street closed to cars, not open to metered ones, on the nights it wants foot traffic. The new restaurant that just took over the Avenue's most storied storefront spent its opening weeks on walk-ins only, refusing to make reservations the barrier between a curious passerby and a table. Even the town's free historical walking tour is built to be joined on a whim, no sign-up required. San Anselmo relearned, expensively, that its downtown works because people can act on impulse. The next few weeks of programming are a town trying not to make that mistake twice.
Two Stages, Six Weeks Left
Live on the Avenue runs Friday and Saturday evenings from June 20 through September 12, with the street closed between Creek Park's amphitheater, a redwood grove with lawn seating, and Town Hall Plaza in the pedestrian heart of downtown. Music has already rolled through Shana Morrison and Caledonia at Creek Park with Koi at Town Hall Plaza on August 1, Soul Ska paired with The Mad Maggies on August 7, and Hall Pass with the Sunhunter Band on August 8. The next date to circle is Saturday, August 29, when Creek Park hosts a Star Wars double feature, A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, the third summer the series has partnered with CAFilm for movie night, while Swami 3 plays Town Hall Plaza. It is one of the last true street-closure nights of the season, and the series wraps for the year around September 12. Creekside Pizza and Taproom sponsors the concerts, the same restaurant whose owner spent last September telling the Town Council exactly how much a parking kiosk can cost a Tuesday night.
A Free Walk Through the Building That Keeps Changing Its Name
If you want the longer view of why the Avenue reacts the way it does to friction, the San Anselmo Historical Commission runs a free docent-led walking tour of the Hub, led by Dick Miner and other commission members, that traces the railroad's role in building the town and how the businesses and architecture along San Anselmo Avenue have turned over across a century. Tours meet at Creek Park at 9 a.m. and end at the Historical Museum for refreshments. The 2026 schedule ran August 8 and continues September 12 and October 10, which means the next opportunity lands on the same day Live on the Avenue closes out its season, morning history and evening music on the same stretch of pavement.
That tour would have walked right past 625 San Anselmo Avenue, a building with more turnover in its history than almost anything else on the street. Louis Kientz opened the San Anselmo Bakery there in 1922, and three generations of the Kientz family ran it for 57 years before closing in 1979. The space was later reimagined as a restaurant that kept the family's name, Kientz Hall. This summer it changed hands again. Tụ Tập, a Vietnamese restaurant with a rooftop bar looking toward Mount Tamalpais, took over the former Kientz Hall space and opened in soft-launch mode on July 29, limiting service to walk-ins while the kitchen and staff settled in. Reservations are expected to open on OpenTable around August 17.
The kitchen is led by chef Justine Kelly, a San Anselmo native who spent 18 years at the Slanted Door and has said the project is partly an homage to the late Charles Phan, the Slanted Door's longtime chef-owner. Her business partners include Bill Upson of the Real Restaurants group, which also runs Buckeye Roadhouse and Picco elsewhere in Marin. The menu leans into clay-pot dishes and mesquite-grilled plates, with a weekend brunch built around dumplings and pho, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle. A building that spent 57 years as a bakery, then decades as a restaurant carrying the baker's name, is now on its third act, and it got there the same slow, walk-ins-first way the rest of the Avenue has learned to reopen itself.
What This Means for Your Next Walk Down the Avenue
If you're planning an evening downtown before Labor Day, park on the Avenue itself and you won't need your phone out before you've even locked the car. Save the lots for when the street is genuinely full, and budget the meter fee if you land in Pine Street or Magnolia. Circle August 29 for the Star Wars night at Creek Park, and if you haven't tried Tụ Tập yet, plan on a walk-in before mid-month or a reservation after. The Avenue spent a year figuring out the hard way what makes people want to stop here. This August, almost everything on the street is built around getting that right.
If you're weighing a move to San Anselmo or anywhere else in Marin, Suzanne Hughes Homes brings the same close attention to neighborhood detail to every listing and every client conversation. Contact Suzanne today to talk through what a specific street, or a specific building's history, might mean for your next move.
