A friend of mine who lives in Nagano-ken claims that there was a recent law passed in Japan eliminating ALL on-street parking. According to her claim, every vehicle in the country must park in a designated parking lot.
Now, I used to live in Tokyo so I know what it’s like there. Parking can be insane rotating car elevators, etc. So I could kind of buy it as a Tokyo or city-only thing. But her claim is that it’s everywhere – even in little towns in the countryside. The context of this claim is that she and her husband run a little restaurant there and business has been tough since this law passed apparently due to the hassle of parking for the customers. Again, this is Nagano-ken. I can’t remember excactly which town ATM, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t even Nagano-shi.
Sound pretty outrageous but it’s kinda hard to call bullshit on someone who actually lives and works there. Maybe it’s true, but if so…wow!
Well, here people continue to park any damn place they please; they “pull over” which means moving to the left side of a very narrow lane on a twisty, busy road, and everyone just drives around them. There are no road shoulders here, people park on the sidewalks if they can get up onto them. It would never go over in the States. Supposedly they are cracking down on this, but the only place I have seen any improvement is on the main 3 lane highway that runs the length of the island. People used to just park in left lane, causing major traffic problems, and that has lessened lately.
I’m in Tokyo right now, and right below my window is a public street (Heisei-dori, if it matters) with many marked parking spaces, each with a working parking meter.
The law that was passed recently (June 1) that made a radical change to city parking didn’t ban street parking. What it did was:
a) allowed the police to hire private companies to handle parking ticket duties, freeing up police to handle ‘real’ police work; and
b) changed the ticketing procedure from “mark the tires of any illegally parked cars with chalk, then make another pass 15 minutes later and ticket anyone who hasn’t moved” to “ticket anyone parked illegally on first sighting if they don’t move the vehicle by the time the ticket is finished” (this may not have been part of the new law, but the new procedure took effect at the same time).
This makes life very inconvenient for delivery drivers, who normally only need to stop for 5 minutes or so. Some inter-bureaucratic squabbles were also sparked when the police announced they’d also be ticketing postal vehicles that were parked in the course of delivering the mail. It also makes street parking much more difficult, as there is now more competition for the already limited supply of legal street spaces. Tickets run about US$150. Fortunately for me, bicycles are still unaffected.
Great thanks for the SD, Sublight. It’s helpful to know not just that her claim isn’t true, but exactly what the law is that recently passed. A crackdown on illegal parking is certainly news nevertheless.