What's with San Francisco?

So I'm reading this article in the NY Times, titled, "San Franciscans Hurl Their Rage at Parking Patrol." As a coincidence, the subject of how the people of San Francisco aren't particularly nice had come up in conversation recently with Michael. The article talks about citizens attacking parking control officers because the parking situation in San Francisco is so terrible. Apparently, these officers say they try not to stray too far from their vehicles or wear their uniforms to lunch because at the very least they will be verbally attacked even when not actually ticketing someone. The more appalling part of the article however, is how the people of San Francisco have defended their position of poorly planned parking.

First:

“Any city that is worth visiting is going to have a terrible parking problem,” ... “If you don’t want it to be Disneyland or Houston, you’re going to be experiencing a parking shortage.”
What's wrong with Houston? Am I missing something? I mean, I'm not a huge Texas fan, but is there something terrible about planning out a city so people don't kill each other over parking spots?

Then comparing themselves to New York:

“It’s too dense for people to drive easily and not dense enough for really great public transit,” ... “So the result is frustration.”

I'm from California. We love our cars and hate public transportation. So I'm sure, with enough research and planning the great city of San Francisco could have the most wonderful public transportation system and people would still want to drive their cars everywhere.

And finally they take their dig at a bunch of other cities:

"chronic lack of parking here was a result of a decision to encourage a bustling downtown free of atmosphere-killing parking lots, a phenomenon echoed in other parking-challenged — and popular — cities like Boston, Chicago and New York."
"Whenever someone from San Francisco calls to whine about the fact there’s no parking,” he said, “I always say, ‘Well, you have to choose, do you want to be more like San Francisco or more like L.A.?’ And that usually ends the conversation.”

OK, so LA is quite the urban sprawl and not always pretty, but what's with all the bashing of other major cities in the U.S.? Also, the quote was from some professor at UCLA, but clearly he is under the San Francisco spell.

So here, in this article about parking issues lies the reasons that the people of San Francisco get bashed. They, along with other Bay Area residents, think they're better than every other U.S. citizen. Everyone has their home pride, but they feel the need to ram that pride down everyone else's throats. Here they are all wonderful, peaceful and liberal and they're beating each other up over parking spaces.

Hmmmm....

I even had some guy tell me how terrible my home town of Huntington Beach was in comparison to his home of Sacramento. I had just met him. He asked me why I would ever move back. Hello, the Pacific Ocean at my feet! Idiot!