I just want to park my car...

The BBQ Pit
1

apparently, that’s too much to ask.

So, I live in a crowded neighborhood where most of the houses and apartments and condos and townhouses were built without garages, and we must park on the street. I can deal with that.

I can even deal with the fact that at least once a week, because there are too many cars, not nearly enough parking, and too few people out policing the illegally parked, I end up park three quarters of a mile away, in a spot that I have to move the car away from before 6am. I’m not happy with the situation, but I have learned that it’s a consequence of living here.

And for the past three years, I have watched the neighborhood get run over by everyone within city limits and his wife and four kids (all of whom must drive separate cars for reasons that I don’t quite understand) come to this neighborhood on the fourth of July to watch the firework displays - and take up more parking, and bring traffic to a virtual standstill, and basically, and all the other associated problems. And I’ve been more or less ok with that. As long as I either got away before 4pm, or came back home before 4pm, I was safe.

But this year, one of you morons in traffic planning came up with the stunningly stupid idea of not letting me park on my street. Nor may I park on the blocks 1 mile to the north of me. I also can’t park anywhere on the mile long stretch of road to the south. From 11am to midnight. At any time during a normal business day, at least 1/2 of these eighty or so spots are taken. At night, nearly all are taken by the people who actually live here. Tomorrow, when every fucking car in the greater metropolitan area is going to be here, it will be hell.

What drugs were you taking when you decided to take away parking spots with hundreds of more cars coming into the area? What mental process failed you? I might be able to understand if you had thought “without those cars there, we’ll have two lanes of traffic” But any idiot could see that there are too many places on the street where the road narrows too far to have more than one lane, and having the cars merge and unmerge and merge and unmerge several times every block is not going to solve the hideous traffic problem of tomorrow night. (And this isn’t even getting into the fact that there’s nearly no bus service into this area on holidays, so it isn’t as though I can leave it somewhere else and return home. You should provide me, and all of my neighbors, with door to door limo service for our inconvenience)

So, that leaves me with the question… what shall I do with my car for 13 hours tomorrow. There won’t be parking here and I need to put it somewhere. I’d love to shove it up your ass, but that’s simply not practical. I’m at a loss.

Ass.

2

You know, I feel for you, I REALLY do… I get hit with the Utah State Fair Park Traffic… hon, yes… I’m so THERE! They go on and on about providing for them, the “others” that need to park but they seem to forget the “regular” folk… weird… and yeah, I’ve been there.

I’m lucky in that I can park in my backyard… I have room for my car and about four others (the folks that come to visit me otherwise they’d be fucked too!)

I dispair that EVERY YEAR, we, who live around the fair grounds, must put up with this… and hon, if you can get ANYONE to give a rat’s ass, I’ll be surprised… they don’t care here… because it’s not “rich” people bitching… go figure…

My best defense and my best offense has been that anytime I see a huge, bloated, SUV I post a combo sticker that says, in effect, “This is ugly, and it robs me and my breathren of parking places”

I guess this WON’T work for you if you are trying to park an SUV…

3

One damn word: VOTE.

Put together a coalition of people in your neighborhood who are fed up with incompetent local government. Put pressure on your politicians. Get the word out. Maybe, when they find themselves totally trounced on Election Day, they’ll see the error of their ways.

4

Hello Father… welcome to the real world… in my little neck of the world they (that mad, hateful, mysterious “they”) has gone out of “their” way and made parking for SUV’s a “PRIORITY”… they get the closest, and best, parking spaces for the Utah State Fair… is there anyone in SLC who will dispute this??? I doubt it.

They know, as I do, that most of our Elected officials drive SUV’s… and they get priority… even at the expense of other, regular folk… in fact, we had a public spokesperson spout that he wouldn’t go anywhere without an SUV because, “I wouldn’t be treated right without one.”… gee, isn’t that lovely? You and I bust a hump to conserve gas, electricity and “they” are out there draining it dry to “keep up the image.”

Gee, can’t I just go away now and shoot myself in the foot or something? Hey, fuck that! Can I just shoot their SUV in the tire or something?!

5

Had a similar problem the other day so I can relate. I live right by Wrigley Field in Chicago and there was a Gay Pride Parade and a Cubs game on the same day (that means a LOT of extra people). I really had no intention of leaving my neighborhood (it’s fun when you you can sit around enjoy the party), but Mrs. Chupacabra, who just had foot surgery and can’t ride the bus, needed a ride home, so I went and picked her up from work. When I came home, I found the police had set up roadblocks on every road that leads to where I live. After sitting in 20 minutes of traffic to get the first roadblock, I finally got up to the police officer and calmly explained that I lived just a block past the road block. He told me there was no way I was getting through. When I explained that he was keeping me from where I LIVED(and I had my DL out as proof) he said, “well you need to live someplace else!” WTF! Thanks, Mr. public servant, for helping me out. This went on for the next hour and a half as I went from roadblock to roadblock looking for a way in. By the time I got to last roadblock, I was incensed and as soon as the cop walked up to my car I was yelling. Interestingly, this guy told me to calm down, and went ahead and let me through. Of course, when his supervisor saw this, he came after me in his cop car with the siren on and yelling at me out of his window to “get off the damn road!” I stopped, and by this time I could point to where I lived, so he actually let me keep going, finally. Now I have no problem with having to negotiate the traffic. As amarinth posted, I made that sacrifice when I decided to live where I live, but I have to wonder, what forward thinking shit for brains decided it would be a good idea to deny residents access to their own homes. I can only imagine it was some Daley-felching weasel of a political appointee who contributed to the mayor’s campaign and knows nothing about city planning.