So I moved into an apartment a few months ago and everything was great. A large furniture retailer is located directly across the street from my apartment. Their back loading dock sits at the corner of an intersection of a major thoroughfare that is 2 blocks from the freeway and a smaller side street. My living room overlooks this loading dock.
About a month ago, they went into “business overdrive” and have been backing trucks up into these docks every 5 minutes for hours at a time, starting at 5AM and sometimes going up until 10 or 11PM. Nonstop backing-up beeps and loud sounds of furniture being loaded and unloaded and industrial trash compactors running. Sucks for me and kind of lame that they are such jerks about that, but I guess legally there’s not much I can do there other than “move”, right?
However, I notice that they tend to double-park 18-wheelers on this side street (and on the public sidewalks), blocking all traffic for 20-30 minutes at a time. They’ll send an employee out into the street, at the intersection, and use that person to prevent anyone from the larger street from turning onto the side street. Around rush hour during the week, people use this side street as a shortcut for getting to the freeway so every day, it inevitably causes a pile-up of traffic and ends with people doing ridiculous things like driving around the double-parked trucks on the sidewalks. The logical person in me can be okay with all the noise but the blatant disregard for the law and disrespect towards other people needing to use that public space is just infuriating to me.
My city has a website for reporting zoning violations and other things like that and both me and my boyfriend separately reported them for their misuse of public roads and sidewalks, but both tickets were just immediately marked as closed with no action taken. I’ve considered calling the police but I know that by the time the police show up, they’ll have stopped double-parking… so it’s annoying that it’s hard to actually catch them in the act.
If you were in this situation, what would you do to escalate it and how would you avoid looking like a crazy person in the process of doing so?