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Move over, Southie: JP now serious contender in the space-saver wars
By adamg on Fri, 02/18/2011 - 8:20am
Steve Garfield captured the scene on one Jamaica Plain street yesterday. Pondside, no less (Eliot Street, to be exact), so it's probably one of those free-range organic toilets.
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Comments
Well it has been a rough winter
Usually don't see those out and about until late spring. Must be hard up for sustenance to be out so early
Don't underestimate JP
Saw a New Yorker's car get "tuned up" on Custer Street after a dayslong passive-aggressive note war. Rearviews broken off, headlights and taillights smashed and -- in an even more dickish rookie move -- the whole driver's side door and front panel keyed. Seriously, if you're going to break the law, just bust a taillight or two. You just hiked the stakes up to a felony by keying thousands of dollars worth of damage into a car.
I guess 70 inches is where JP ends and pseudo-Southie begins. Eagerly awaiting today's melt.
This is not the least bit surprising.
I figured that this s**t would spread to other parts of the city.
and you didn't call the police?
Charming. Great job, neighbor.
Where did it say I didn't call the police?
I thought that would be a given.
Misunderstanding
I thought the mayor said the city'd be OK with space savers for 48 HOURS after a storm, but apparently they really said 48 DAYS.
Why not just have them year-round then? As long as we're practicing sanctioned anarchy and barbarism, why not have the first person to pull up to a spot own it for the rest of eternity?
Be right back, gonna go key a car in Allston that's parked in a spot I claimed in 2006.
This may be my inner 13 year old talking
but wouldn't it be funny if somebody took a dump in that space saver? Or several somebodies? I sure couldn't do it, but I would find it hysterical.
ewwwwwwwww....yuck!
Nope...not a bit funny, that.
No need
Where's that trash can overflowing with dog poop?
In Brighton, they do save them year round
When I lived on Morrow Road in Brighton, the lifers on each side of our place marked their spots year round. One night someone moved the trash cans the one guy used to mark his space and parked there. When he came home he freaked out and dumped garbage all over the offending car and bounced the cans off it. This was in the middle of the summer. Way to go 50 year old loser.
The space saver wars could
The space saver wars could get ugly here. The obvious thing to do is for someone to come along and take a big 'ol smelly dump in that thing. I nice present for them when they come back to "there spot".
Are those skid marks?
Are those skid marks?
The JP space saver situation
is pretty awful. This is just one of many in the neighborhood. I actually took out a plastic table with my car when I took "someone's" spot the other day. Crushed it to bits.
This one seems especially egregious since it's right in front of the Eliot School. I have class there once a week and it's been a royal pain getting parking there because of stupid shit like this. Menino needs to actually start doing something about this.
There's a public lot a block
There's a public lot a block away. And I used it at night a few weeks ago, so don't say it's always full.
Yuppie space savers
Hopefully Whole Foods will begin to sell organic/biodegradable/natural space savers.
And just like Southie
all the yuppies want to move there and overpay for their property.
What happened to being neighborly?
As ugly as space savers are, I take more issue with the lazy people who just drive out of their snowy spaces then take the clean spots of those who did shovel. And there is a special place in hell for my neighbors who are STILL parking in the middle of the street rather than shoveling out a space by their door. However, I don't advocate damaging the property of others. A friend's new car was keyed while visiting weeks after the last storm. He parked in a space that had NO marker. A couple years ago my car was vandalized twice in one month when parked in front of my own house in a space that I had shoveled.
This is all Pondside! So much for class.
Come to think of it ...
Wasn't the Parking Nazi a Pondsider?
A modest proposal
For $100 a month or, say, a yearly $1000 or $1500, you are assigned a numbered spot. This would be painted clearly and maintained with funds from the program.
In other words, you rent a dedicated spot from the city where you want to park your car. For that fee, you get the right to have anybody using your spot towed.
For visitors, the city could maintain a visitor parking area for every x number of spots. Car or not, you could get one permit per household to park up to, say, 10 or 20 times a year - meter readers could simply scan a bar code and issue a ticket for expired or overuse of a visitor permit.
Or would this be too civilized and interfere with entitlement too much? Owning a car is costly - so I don't want to hear about "wahhhh that's too expensive". If people can't share properly in public property, and want to act as if they own it when they don't, maybe the city should put a price on the service.
Going rate for a convenient
Going rate for a convenient parking spot is already over $100/mo.
Reduce free on-street parking, and you only drive up the price.
When the price goes up to market value, only the wealthy will be able to afford parking.
I'm sure the wealthy would like that, as traffic is also lightened for them.
Much like drivers appreciate that other people take the T.
Car owners are "the wealthy."
Car owners are "the wealthy."
Yeah, the 25-year-old with
Yeah, the 25-year-old with the $18,000 per year job and the $500 Honda Civic beater is a regular aristocrat. Or are you strictly comparing car owners with homeless people?
Strawman
Considering that:
Car insurance is about $1000 a year for that age group
Rent/Utilities would run about $500 a month or more even if cramming into a dump with three other people
Car maintenance and upkeep cost money too, as does inspection and license renewal
I'm not seeing that this person could even live in Boston and own a car and make it work in any way, parking cost or no - unless he's in his parent's home and getting reduced or no rent. Obviously, said straw25yearold would need to be subsidized somehow ... and wouldn't be depending on that fictitious $500 car to get to work and back because said vehicle would be unreliable anyway. Never mind that a $500 car that runs no longer exists.
Back to 1980 with you ...
Not impossible
Rent could be lower in a subsidized building.
$1000 per year for insurance is with comprehensive and collision. I have a few young cow orkers who pay a lot less than that just for state minimum insurance on things like beater Civics.
Fine, let's say the kid makes
Fine, let's say the kid makes double that. Now he is at $36,000 per year. He can now afford all those crazy expenses you brought up. And let's say the car was $5,000. Does this now make him "wealthy"? That was, after all, the point being disputed.
But, you just wanted to intentionally miss the point and "show off" or something.
"ridiculous" cost of parking
That's similar to the per capita household income in Boston. S/he is making more than most households. Maybe not wealthy, but financially better off than her neighbors. This is an interesting article about the dollar cost of driving in Boston. Note the opening sentence where the author references the "ridiculous" cost of parking. It couldn't be less expensive unless the city paid YOU to park your car!
What's the general case for
What's the general case for city-subsidized parking, the status quo, other than inertia?
The reason there's a shortage of parking is because it's under-priced. Parking spots are a limited resource. Prices go up? Then someone will find it worth their while to construct a parking lot. Prices go down? Then that land can be used for something else.
I don't see any reason that parking needs to be an exception to the usual workings of business.
Problem with the proposal
I think the issue would be that there are more people with cars than there are convenient parking spaces. So in my building we've got 5 units with 5 cars and one unit vacant. A new building went up next door that with 4 units that once occupied will have at least one car per unit. In front of our two units we've got space for maybe 3 cars. And then there's the rest of the houses on the street -- many with multiple cars per family. And this is the case all across the city before we even get to the topic of people visiting you or if you're near a commercial area, people visiting nearby businesses.
I think the modest proposal has something to do with people having an accessible and reliable public transportation system along with street infrastructure that is safe and accessible for bikers and walkers.
Or...
Yes, I agree that we need better public transportation. It's cyclical though; it isn't being improved because the demand isn't high enough, but people aren't taking it and increasing the demand because they think the T sucks.
Oddly though, many of the people who don't take it because it's not reliable or it sucks or it's for losers or whatever are the people who live in areas with good T coverage and have professional jobs where it's not a big deal if they're late sometimes. What's their excuse?
As far as the space savers and crap, I think Boston is just an anomaly in that people don't get that it's a freakin' city, it's a pain in the ass to have a car in the city, you don't really need one no matter how crappy the T is, and if you have a car in the city you sometimes have to suck it up and walk a ways to get to your car.
not due to lack of demand for transit
Plenty of people ride some of the transit lines, but the T wastes millions of dollars on other wasteful projects.
The T should increase capacity and speed up the Green Line, and build subways to the dense urban neighborhoods with no rail access. Instead, we get things like the Greenbush commuter rail, and the billion dollar Silver Line tunnel, which is much slower and has far less capacity than real subway lines, including the Blue Line's airport connection.
The T has also spent millions of dollars on new signal systems for the Red and Orange Lines, which reduced the capacity by causing traffic jams if they run trains more than every 5 minutes.
GL Extension
Like the Green Line extension? It's a very compelling project on the merits: Somerville is a dense urban area, it's underserved, there's an existing historic right-of-way that is well-maintained. It's actually kind of surprising that it hasn't been done already.
Why is there a billion dollar price tag attached to this? It's not even going to go all the way to West Medford. It's paralleling an existing track. Moving Lechmere might cost a bit, but what else? Once upon a time we had trolley tracks all over Boston, these were built without spending the equivalent of a billion in 1900 dollars. Park St station used to handle more trolleys per hour 90 years ago than it does today. I really don't know how these costs get out of hand.
Chicken, Egg or $500 a barrel crude?
One of the things that can get us out of that chicken-egg cycle is a good round of political instability in the oil producing areas of the world...bump up the price of gas to clo0se to $5 a gallon and people will take the T. No matter how poopy.
And hey, speaking of political instability....
WAIT
has anyone tried a grand piano yet?
if not, let me know so I can get this going....