I am also perplexed by this thread. Is the “snow emergency” just a Minnesota thing? I’m pretty sure there’s no “leaving holy lawn chairs” in Minneapolis, because they’d be plowed over. My husband used to live in an apartment building in Minneapolis that had a small parking lot for tenants. His problem was that his landlord would want to plow the parking lot while the snow emergency was going on, so he couldn’t find parking on the street, either. Or, at least, legal parking. He was towed at least once because Minneapolis’s rules were so confusing. However, at least all streets were eventually plowed curb-to-curb, avoiding the problems of the OP.
I’ve heard from my husband that Kitchener, Ontario, city rules were no on street parking at all, and all city streets were cleaned within 24 hours of a snowfall. That’s not do-able for a city like Chicago, obviously, but they didn’t have any problems like these in Kitchener.
I’m a firm believer that residential street parking comes under the heading of “unwritten rules of society.” You know what the rules are, you know that they apply to you, you know that they have no official standing, and you also know that you’re an asshole when you disregard them (that last might be deep down inside, but I think people still know it).
And the snowball downhill starts. First your a jerk, then your neighbor retaliates and eventually property is damaged or someone is injured. You’ve proved my point.
In the one neighborhood that I lived in where street parking in snow was an issue, it was the case that everyone on the block pretty much knew who the two freeloaders were and they learned pretty fast that no matter how they responded they were going to lose and lose badly because there were a few over a dozen of us living on the street perfectly willing to enforce neighborhood etiquette.
And it never got to a question of “damage” in my experience, just “you don’t do the work to clean your own, the rest of the block is going to dump the shoveled snow on your car next time and bury it completely.” Grant that this was generally gritty and dirty from the plowing, but frankly no one in the neighborhood had a car where this would have caused any more noticeable damage–it was cheap row houses. I lived in a relatively nice neighborhood, though, and we didn’t usually have this problem more than once with any given resident.
Flex 'em harder. :rolleyes: Lemme ask you this–if you were the only guy on your street of 12 houses who didn’t shovel out your own part of the curb, would you still be flexing this hard? Or would you maybe think that hey, there’s an unwritten code here that’s working pretty well to keep the street clear for everyone?
My current neighborhood does this, and it’s the ideal in my opinion–there are people in this thread that prove that someone is always going to spoil any grassroots efforts at maintaining a useful service that the city doesn’t provide.
I used to live for years in an apartment with a parking lot. Every snow storm I would have to sit in my window to watch the people that would dig out the cars on either side of mine, by simply shoveling all of the snow behind my car.
Every single year, I would have to either open the window or go outside and yell at someone, and most looked at me funny like they couldn’t figure out why I was mad.
And then there was the lady in the silver Altima who had some OCD issues (she would park her car and walk around 10-15 times and straighten it out for a half hour) who was twice parked next to mine in a snow storm. She would scoop a shovel of snow, walk to the other side of the sidewalk and dump it (very good so far), look at the shovel and notice it still had a few flakes of snow on it, so proceed to smack it against the side of my car to get it off.
Some people are just assholes.
Why did I move to the suburbs? To get away from about half of the type of people in this thread.
When the oil runs out and everybody is forced to live in the city, the murder rate is going to skyrocket. I’ve got a big snow shovel and I’m not afraid to use it.
Yes, and ski masks work so well when they have you on film (with a skimask) coming out of your door, committing a crime, then going back inside. Even Car 54 can figure that crime out.
No one is advocating “taking advantage of someone else’s hard work to clear a spot instead of doing it yourself”. The scenario is you drive onto the street you live on. There’s one spot open, and it’s in front of your neighbors house. He is gone- maybe 10 minutes, maybe all day, who knows? Your choice is to either park around the block- in front of someone else house, or use that spot. There’s no real choice, of course you use that spot.
Now sure, if you sit there at the end of the street, waiting for a neighbor to clear a spot and drive off- then snag that spot just because you’re too lazy to clear a spot in front of your house- then that is being a jerk. Of course, even that level of jerk does not justify criminal vengeance.
Hell, around here, I have almost he opposite problem. Most people have off-street parking, and there is always plenty of parking on the street. I’d much rather use the off-street parking, because my roommates and I have a one lane driveway for four people, and car shuffling every night, or having to move your car so a roommate can leave, is annoying as fuck. I’d gladly park on the street and dig myself out (since with four cars in the driveway the plow guy can’t even get in there anyway,) but my town has a night parking ban. No one can park on the street between midnight and 6 AM at all. This is so if it does snow, the city plows can go right up to the curb.
This, to me, is moronical. I understand the need for a parking ban to clear the snow, and when 99% of all car owners have their own off-street parking, asking them not to park on the street for one or two nights isn’t a big deal, so why not just do that when it snows? There’s no reason to have it be every night when most nights in the winter it doesn’t actually snow! Other towns around here do it that way. And it’s not just to ease the “car shuffling,” but if I had friends over, they have to either leave and drive home (did I mention we’re young and often drink on weekends?) or we try to squeeze more cars in the driveway…we can get six if the last guy doesn’t mind the ass-end of his car on the sidewalk and almost in the road.
You would have a point if there were city workers going around, digging out cars for you, and it was just a matter of waiting for them to come around.
But that’s not the case. If you need to go somewhere that’s not within walking distance (and really, who wants to walk in 16" of snow?), you have to dig out your car. There is no other option, other than waiting indefinitely for the snow to melt.
After digging out my car this weekend, I sympathize with the OP’s annoyance, but I realize there’s no solution to the problem other than getting all the neighbors to dig out the whole block at the same time.
Actually, what I’M talking about, not speaking for Airman or anyone else, is the case of the jerk who doesn’t shovel at all, drives off and leaves a perfectly valid parking space filled with snow and packed ice (from his boots and tires), and then comes back and sees that the spot in front of my house is cleared out and ice-free while the spot in front of his house is, natch, still filled with snow and icy shit–so he parks in front of my house, leaving me to park on his packed ice and laziness.
It’s not an issue of not getting a parking spot or there only being one spot left–in most of these neighborhoods, people are commuting out and back but no one is randomly adding to the car population.
Anyone who knows me well would laugh at this question. I thrive on shit like that, and I don’t back down from bullies. I would be doing nothing wrong by parking on a public street, and I don’t care how many sickos try to gang up on me for it.
Of this I have no doubt. I read about the results in the paper all the time.
I’m just making sure I’m 100% clear that you’d, when presented with a situation of “the local government doesn’t take care of this problem, so we all together in this neighborhood have a method that we use to take care of it”, you’d laugh and say “HAHA no, I got mine, suckers”.
How very Neocon of you.
Z, I understand your situation, and I agree that the 2 non-shovellers sound like jerks and crappy neighbors. And I really understand how something like this would piss you off. But where you and I seem to disagree is whether being upset at a neighbor excuses your messing with (if not damaging) their property.
It really sucks dealing with crappy neighbors. But if their car is legally parked and not on your property, I really don’t think it is appropriate for you to mess with it. Would you like people to mess with your car - or house or other belongings - if they disapproved of something you did that was entirely legal? What if your car alarm goes off in the middle of the night? Maybe a neighbor who works graveyard ought to take a baseball bat to it. Or if I don’t like the way you tend your lawn, should I write as much on your lawn with rock salt? Or just put a brick through your window? Probably bad analogies, and maybe I’m perverted by my legal training, but I tend to draw pretty strict lines when it comes to messing with other peoples’ property.
Just about the only justified example I could come up with was if a neighbor and their kids left their toys and such on my property. I could imagine being not entirely gentle as I relocated them back across the property line. But that is vastly different from the snow situation because your front lawn is your property in a manner that the street most definitely is not. (Just to be too terribly specific, in some places lot lines extend to the center of the street, but the public is permitted an easement over the street and sidewalk portions.)
It really can seem helpless to be unable to take matters into your own hands in such situations. And placing a sternly worded note under the offender’s wiper fails to fully satisfy. But that is one of the frustrations about living in an urban environment.
And I suspect that a great many (if not most) such situations are quite different from yours. What if only 1/2 of the homeowners on a block shovel? If I shovel and come back to find my space occupied, what are my options? What if your cleared space is the only space available? Or what if I do not live in the neighborhood but am visiting one of your neighbors, or visiting the neighborhood to go to church or shop? (Maybe your neighborhood did not have stores or churches within walking distance, but my old neighborhood in Chicago certainly did.) What if the driver is old or disabled, pregnant, or with kids or a passenger who is old or infirm? You wouldn’t know any of that from the simple fact of an unknown car occupying the space you cleared.
Oh - and I think most of us can agree that DtC presents himself in a manner to suggest that he would most likely fit into the category of crappy neighbors.
I’m not necessarily saying it’s justified (while I will freely admit I certainly thought it was when I was just out of college and grumpy about the bare fact of maintaining my own house. =P), just that it will happen because someone on your block is going to be pissed about it.
Part of it is, too, the general dynamic in the urban neighborhoods I’ve lived in, where culturally speaking one was expected to have first use of the public street/sidewalk directly in front of their domicile–with no off-street parking, this sort of thing was the easiest way to keep the peace in the neighborhood. There’s an underlying argument about de facto vs. de jure property here, of course, and to what extent public property can be staked out (not necessarily legally these days, but “morally”). Really, that’s pretty much what it boils down to–while the street parking is legally-speaking public property, in practice specific sections of it are generally used by the same people over and over, and they acquire a personal moral interest in treating the work they do on said public property as granting them some kind of claim over it.
There’s also a more general “tragedy-of-the-commons”-inspired view of it, that I’ve tried to allude to–in the neighborhood I lived in, it was treated as a sort of de-facto “homeowner’s association” style rule than anything else, albeit enforced by college kids and recent graduates–“the street belongs to everyone, so don’t fuck it up by not shoveling, packing shit down into ice, and then leaving it for someone else to clean up.”
A lot of these issues can also be solved by better urban planning and/or ordinances, which would honestly be preferable–my current hometown has both ordinances detailing which sides of the street to park on by day of the week (for to-the-curb plowing) and updated building codes to mandate off-street parking as buildings are upgraded or rebuilt.
This, at least, I can answer–when I lived in such a neighborhood, it wasn’t unknown cars that would get this treatment. Basically, the only people who’d get snow dumped on their cars were people who were known to be freeloading–this was usually obvious, since when there WASN’T snow everyone just parked in front of their own house. The only nearby stores were in a strip mall with relatively ample parking.
And yeah, DtC perpetually rubs me the wrong way.
OK, let’s say that Dio, **Doors **and I all live in the same neighborhood. Comes a big snow storm, nor does it cease to come. Everybody’s snowed in. **Doors **digs his way out, leaves, and comes back to find me parked in “his” spot. Riddle me this : How did I get there without digging myself out of my spot?
Wow, none of you live in London. It seems like most of the houses around here don’t have driveways, so everyone parks on the street. Which means a row of cars on either side of the street - ergo, what is supposed to be a two-lane street is only wide enough for one car at a time.
The snow since last Thursday has resulted in massive ice patches. I’ve lived in NY and Minnesota; snow doesn’t bother me a bit - but boy, most Londoners don’t know how to drive in snowy/icy conditions. I’ve seen a handful of fender-benders outside our house every day since the weekend.
My house has a driveway, so I don’t worry at all about parking. And there is a small island/lamp post in the middle of the street right in front of our house, which means no one can park within about 30 feet of either side of our driveway, so parking has never been much of a problem. Well, that and the fact that we have a Mini Cooper, which could pretty much park itself in a closet <g>
On our street, the rule is clear - you can park in front of your house. You can park nearby if you’re visiting. You do not leave your car in front of someone else’s house for extended periods of time - that is very bad form.
There are massive problems in the street behind us, near the Tube station - people park there to get on the Tube, and there are constant hassles in the morning when I’m walking by - people arguing that ‘that space’ is ‘theirs’…
I dunno, but if you like having a good relationship with your neighbors you’ll dig out a spot.
Maybe you have big-ass four-wheel drive SUV, so you didn’t have to dig out. But the guy who did has a Pinto and had to.
Or maybe you dug out a spot and someone else parked there, forcing you to take Doors’s.
Or maybe you parked you car on the main street during the snow storm, and you knew beforehand this street would get plowed and salted to the max. And then when it was all over, you decided to move your car back to “your” block, and lucked out with Doors’s snow-free spot.
I can think of more possibilities, and although they’re all completely understandable, it still doesn’t make it less annoying. Which I think is all Doors is saying.
Here in Florida, we all have parking. And it doesn’t snow.