Have a personal scenario that I could use some input in. To keep a short story short, there’s a couple a few doors down from me that has four cars and I’m pretty damned pissed off about it, since parking is already a bitch and one of the cars is a damn SUV while the other three are all sedans, not exactly tiny. I live with the girlfriend and we have one car each (hatchbacks) for work.
I can’t fathom why they’d need four, especially a big bloody 4x4. What say you? Am I getting my knickers in an unwarranted twist or being reasonable or what? What would you do/say?
Oh, it annoys me SO much. My neighbor has four-five cars (I can never tell which) and an RV. The RV is parked in front of MY house. It turns out I have no recourse because they can just park it off the main road. And to make matters worse, they don’t park ANY of them in their driveway, because they put a martial arts dummy at the end of their drive and spend all their free time beating the crap out of it.
How many cars do you freakin need?
ETA: You do not need a SUV to drive in the snow. I drive in the snow every year with my hatchback, and before that, a sedan. I’ve been driving in the snow since I was 17 and I never had an SUV.
Damn, how do they pay for all that insurance? And really I wouldn’t care if they didn’t take up all the parking.
Well, need is a strong word. If you living in city with good public transit, you NEED zero
More realistically, I would expect one care per driver. I can see an extra car for moving/driving in the woods/whatever, but 2 cars per person is pushing it.
This is not at all influenced by my wackadoodle neighbors and their … lovely crotchfruit, that continually park their … not yet antique cars in front of my house on a regular basis.
I vote for unwarranted twisted knickers (band name?). People do things differently, and some folks enjoy having more cars than others. Parking is always a problem in urban areas and one couple having 4 vehicles isn’t any different than a family of four moving in, each with their own cars.
I doubt the insurance is very expensive. The insurance company knows you can only drive one at a time, so it’s cheaper than insuring one car four times.
And if I were rich enough, I’d have multiple cars. But they’d be different types. Maybe a convertible for nice days, a pickup for moving stuff, etc. But I wouldn’t do it unless I had enough garage or driveway space to keep them off the street.
IMO taking up more than one street parking place per person is rude. If you want to have multiple cars, then find a garage or parking lot or driveway to park them in.
Snow is not uncommon in winter, but they’re pretty good about gritting the streets and I’ve never had a problem round here without an SUV.
I feel your pain, truly.
@ Telemark, I can kinda get where you’re coming from, although what’s the upper limit for a couple? 5? 6? There’s gotta come a point when others who need the parking call bullshit.
They may run a home business. Some people don’t put commercial lettering right on the vehicles but have the vehicles as a dual personal/commercial thing. Which means they may not put on lettering at all, or put on a magnet only as needed. So most or all of the time they simply look like normal personal cars.
They may have a guest over for an extended stay and that accounts for an extra car.
They may be holding a car for another family member who will come take possession later.
They may have a kid with a car. Kid may be at college and not able to take the car with them full-time.
In the end I could only see needing two cars for two people myself, but I don’t know their full situation. I’d probably be somewhat annoyed too but what can you do. They’re free to buy a dozen cars if they want.
How do you know they are all the same neighbor’s cars? I guess you’ve seen them exiting all four vehicles at some point?
It’s just being a bad neighbor, parking all those cars along the street. Like I said, my neighbor won’t even park ONE car in their driveway because of that stupid martial arts dummy.
And I think if you buy an RV, a big, unsightly thing, you should have some plan to park it besides “in front of the neighbor’s house”.
Possible, but the bloke in the relationship is usually gone most of the day. Not sure what the lady does.
If so, they’ve had guests staying or holding an extra car since I moved in, about a year and a half ago. They got another about a month ago, not seen anyone else use it.
Yep, never seen anyone else driving them. A dozen cars?! I would flip my shit. Of course they’re free to do it, but they’re also free to have then entire street hate them. As it is the situation already has jimmies fairly rustled, mine included.
Yeah, I said I’d like an SUV for snow, not that it’s required. Any day my VW can’t handle the snow, I’m probably better off on skis anyway.
But I don’t blame anyone who can’t do that, and if I had kids, I’d want the option to go driving in any weather.
That’s the beauty of living in a free society; we’re allowed to own things we don’t need.
I personally own 2 vehicles plus I have a company vehicle and if I purchase another vehicle, I will not ask my neighbor for permission. That being said, I would not want to park any vehicle that I own on city/urban streets, the damage caused others would bother me too much.
If they’re all black sedans I’d point right to a business being the culprit myself. There’s a guy on my street who owns his own limo for his limo service and parks it on the street. 4 cars? How about parking around a limo!
And although the other family in our rental house seems to own about 6 cars, thankfully we have garage/driveway parking enough for all of them.
I certainly don’t expect you to ask me for permission before you buy your cars! I just think if you HAVE driveway space you could use it for at least one car. Can they not at least pull one car in, past their martial arts dummy?
This is why we can’t have nice things, like shared street parking. There’s always one ass who gobbles up a bigger share than everyone else, then acts like YOU are the jerk if you have a problem with it.
At one point my dad had 13 cars supporting 5 drivers. He made sure to have off street parking for them, either at the house or the body shop, and a fair number of the cars were not exactly street worthy or daily drivers.
There may be a point, but I’m not sure what it is. I live in a neighborhood where the majority of the houses use onstreet parking and sometimes I have to drive a block over to find a spot. I knew what I was signing up for when I moved here. Our downstairs neighbors don’t have a car, we have two, and the upstairs neighbor has one car but two adult sons who often stay over and each has a car. Everyone is out on the street and it all sort of averages out.
It’s not clear to me that you have to call bullshit at any point. Unless you have local laws that restrict how long a car can sit in one spot (we have that here) as long as the cars are moving from time to time it’s all part of the mosaic of urban life. The only time I could see getting upset is during a snow emergency when half the on street spots are not available. I’d be mad if a neighbor had a driveway and didn’t use it, but most people with driveways park in them during the winter for that very reason.
How many cars does one couple need? In my case, we get along with 1 car for a large part of the year. We have 2 cars, but one is a sporty convertible that has no hopes of getting anywhere in the snow, so it’s put up for 4-6 months a year. We get along with the one other car for that time.
Of course, we both work from home, so that makes things easier. Though for about a year and a half, I did have a job outside the home. We just coordinated; I’d either take the car, or he’d drive me to work if he needed the car that day. It was a slight hassle, but not so much that we considered buying another car.
The irony of it all is that we live on several acres and have a huge driveway and garage space for 3 cars. We could easily have 10 or more cars and not have a problem parking them off the street and out of sight of our neighbors.
As many as they want. It doesn’t sound like they are breaking the law. I don’t know your local laws but highly doubt that street parking is limited to one space per resident.
Even if it’s legal for one person to take up multiple parking spots on the street, it may not be polite. I think it’s rude to take more than your fair share of a public resource.
