You can arrange for Residents Only street parking in most cities, but there’s an initial evaluation and set-up cost and then everyone needs to buy permit stickers. The folks that had their own sign made were doing a cheaper version.
In our neighborhood, parking your car in front means that you can keep an eye on it.
I grew up in a neighborhood of row houses in suburban Baltimore in the 50s and 60s. Back in those olden days, most women were stay-at-home moms and most families just had one car. People were mostly pretty good about parking in front of their own houses, with the overflow going to the side road. We lived in a corner unit, so even if someone parked right in front of our house, there was still plenty of curb going down the side street.
Then people started getting multiple cars. And one family got a pop-up camper. Sometimes you had to park a block and a half away in front of the animal cemetery. Yep, pretty annoying. That, among other things, led my folks to sell their house and move to the boonies where they had a quarter mile long driveway.
We live in the boonies also, on a corner lot, and everyone has driveways. About the only time you see street parking is if someone is having a big party. But every once in a while, I see cars parked on the side street either next to our yard or across the street. Judging by the beer bottles and cans I find when I mow, I’m guessing it’s kids drinking in the dark (no street lights) - I bet they get spooked when I turn on the floodlights in my yard to let the dog out… 
I occasionally park in front of the house across the street from mine when I come home on my lunch break. Why?
there’s a big ol’ tree there and I live in Texas where it was until very recently a bazillion degrees out, so even if I’m just parking for fifteen stinkin’ minutes my car - or any other - will broil over, hence: shade = OMGrainbowsandkittens
my area has strict “park the same way as traffic” laws (meaning, no parking facing the “wrong” way) and parking across the street means my car is now facing the way I’ll leave after my break, which I like
why the fuck not?
I used to live in a college town close to campus, and the Other Shoe and I got used to the idea that some random car would inevitably be parked in front of our house. 'S okay. They’re allowed to do that.
It’s most common in places where shoveling out your parking space in winter is a major task. Your friend with the pick up truck wouldn’t make it half a block before he was spoken to by the well behaved citizens of the neighborhood.
I think part of the underlying ethos, out here in suburbia at least, is that you really don’t know when someone else is going to need the space in front of their house for guest parking, or for the yard man to park his truck and trailer, or whatever. So you try to park in your driveway or in front of your own house whenever possible.
If I’m giving a party, my guests might have to park in front of my neighbors’ houses once they’ve taken up all the room in front of mine - but I’m damned sure going to give my neighbors a heads-up (and invite them to the party if it’s not strictly family).
But I think the larger part is simply the usual stuff about how you give relative strangers their space. If the bus is mostly empty, you sit down in an empty seat, rather than sitting down next to someone. (Hey, gonna sit by you, another one rides the bus.) You don’t sit at the table next to someone in a practically empty fast-food restaurant. If there are 7 occupied campsites in a 100-site campground, you don’t pull up right next to or across from one of the occupied sites. And you don’t park in front of someone else’s house when there’s room in front of your own house, and your guests try to park in front of your house, too, as long as there’s room.
You just don’t gratuitously intrude on the psychological space of people you don’t know very well, even when they don’t own that space in fee simple.
Sure, OK. But I think what the OP was wondering was: when it happens, as it inevitably does, that someone remains in the outer reaches of your personal space (the space that you know isn’t really your personal space as such, and if it were crowded, you would recognize that you would have to give it up), why do some people insist on becoming preoccupied with this minor violation, instead of moving on with their lives?
Which I think is a very good question.
I don’t get why some people find it so upsetting when someone parks legally in front of their house. It’s especially puzzling when the neighbourhood is near something like a hospital or school or something. I used to live across the street from the library of a large university, and one of my neighbours regularly left nasty notes and threatened to call the police on people who parked in front of her house*. If you bought a house across the street from a public university (one that had been there almost 200 years), why the hell would you expect that there would never be other people around? She just wanted the best of both worlds - the convenience of living in a nice area without the hassle of those pesky other people who also want to be there.
I never heard of this until I started reading the Dope, and it still seems crazy and incredibly rude and stupid to me. And yet everyone who does it defends it to the death. I don’t get it. And yes, I grew up (and still live) somewhere that gets plenty of snow all winter long, and I have shovelled out many a car. So it’s not like I don’t know the effort involved.
*Of course she also called the police on us once because we accidentally left our garbage can out for 24 hours after garbage pick-up, so she might just have been the kind of crazy old crank who shouldn’t live near other people at all.
This would be considered horribly rude here in the True North.
Plus, I don’t see how it would work, really. When the snow plow comes it’s supposed to go around all the lawn chairs and garbage cans? Around here your can/chair would just get smashed by the plow, I suspect. But even if they went around, the edge of the plow leaves a large piling/mound of heavy, densely packed snow, so your spot would be filled with the snow that should be piled at the curb. Much wiser to leave it clear so the plow can do the work, I say.
I was thinking along the lines of what RTFirefly said.
Some of the responders are in the UK, I don’t know whether they own the sidewalk in front of their house or not (nor whether there is a sidewalk), but when I first arrived to Miami, I was amazed by the existence of residential neighborhoods without sidewalks - and even more when I found out that often what sidewalks existed were part of what I would have considered the adjacent property: they were private property, in Spain sidewalks are public property.
Having sidewalks be public property and every street have them means that there is always a buffer between your space and wherever cars are parked, even if they’ve got two wheels on the curb. Someone parking beside your property in the US is touching your personal space; someone parking with two wheels in your lane (post #6) is trespassing.
Who does that, though? Unless it’s actually a proper inconvenience, like blocking the driveway, forcing someone with a disability to walk a long way, or causing you to park two blocks away on a regular basis, do people actually get more het up than just grumbling about it? It’s easy to mistake someone else’s grumble for obsessive preoccupation even though you’d be annoyed if they made the same assumption about you.
IME, few people get preoccupied with it unless it keeps on happening with some regularity. Even minor violations of one’s personal space become annoying if kept up persistently enough.
Sure, some people will get preoccupied with something like this even if it happens infrequently, but some people will get preoccupied over any silly shit.
Yup. For example, one of my neighbors has a college-aged kid that, when he’s home all summer, parks directly across from my driveway, meaning I have to be more careful every time I leave my house, as the road is quite narrow. The property line is reasonably long, and there’s no compelling reason for him to park exactly there (ie. no sidewalk, the door isn’t there, etc), yet he does, every day, all summer. If I were paranoid I’d think he did it on purpose.
I acknowledge his right to park there, but it still annoys the living shit out of me.
Holy Christ! Now he needs to prove a compelling reason not only to park in front of your house, but to park across the street from you.
I hope some of the defenders of this pretended right to suppress parking can start to see some of the misgivings we detractors have.
No, she didn’t say that. She absolutely said he had a right to park there, but that inconvenienced her. Honestly, do you just not read posts and make up whatever you like to hear?
You keep confusing rudeness with violation of one’s legal rights. Now you’re projecting that confusion on others.
Are you being disingenuous, or do you really not understand the difference?
Oh, man. Don’t move the chair and park in the space. There are some particularly vindictive people who will bury your car in snow and/or hose it down until it ices up.
Just to make it more clear, what part of
don’t you understand?
If the question is: Do you have a right to park on public streets where there is no restriction on parking? Then the answer is quite plain, ain’t it, sweetheart?
No, the OP of this thread wonders whether people are being justified in being annoyed, much as the poster who I commented upon stated he/she was.
Golly, Anaamika, do you think then, that when I said “had to prove” I didn’t mean “in a court of law to win the legal right to park there,” but instead meant “to the satisfaction of the homeowner so as to avoid his/her resentment.”
Maybe you could take your own advice.
ETA: The above goes double for RTFirelfly
You know what? Never mind. it really isn’t worth it. Ta!
More mild irritation for me. We live on a dead-end street / cul-de-sac (sp?). If someone parks in front of my house, I have to park in front of someone else’s, etc. The only real irritation that people get is that in Southern California nice 2-car garages are used for storage, not parking. In our neighborhood, the garages are big enough for two mid-sized sedans, but not larger vehicles like my truck (unless I want to door ding myself. So my parking system:
1 car in the garage (the rest is my workshop and storage)
1 car on the driveway (my truck)
1 car in front of our house (my son’s car). This spot has room for two mid-sized cars, so we park to make it possible for another car.
Now, when my neighbor parks there, after using NONE of his garage for parking, I get mildly irritated - but nothing significant. He is a good friend, and the irritation is more like a buzzing fly that goes away. Of course, the other neighbor who puts both of his cars in his garage no doubt gets the same irritation with me.
We also park our cars across our driveway when things are tight, which is technically illegal in California.