Street Parking, Street Fighting

Like the ancient times, there are fiefdoms in the Boston area. These are controlled by roving hoards of tenants and home owners, and they're protected not by moats and drawbridges, but by desk chairs and orange traffic cones. I'm talking about parking spaces. To say it's public land available for any member of the public would only describe the letter of the law. Street justice though, has a different interpretation.

The rule goes like this: if you dig out your car, you own that parking space. In Massachusetts, this gives you the right to harm any vehicle that takes that space. I'm not saying I believe this is ok. I'm saying this is how it works. And this attitude--a sort of condonement like the person commiting the crime has no choice but to follow the rules of the street--is the attitude you'll encounter in a few places in Massachusetts and especially Boston. The Globe puts out a couple of articles on this every winter and this one describes it quite well.

When I lived in Somerville a couple of years ago, I went on a vision quest to dig out multiple spots and purposely not save them. The idea was that everyone would get that sense of communal pain. Everybody's got to dig out a space at some point, and once they're all dug out? Plenty to go around. Things seemed to go well for me for the first month or two, but eventually the time came where I dug out a space, and came back home to find that someone had claimed it for him or herself--without having earned it. Well, now I understood the rage. I tossed the cone on to the sidewalk and attached a note saying "you didn't even dig this out!" I saw the cone sitting on a neighbor's porch a couple of days later, making me feel like a 9 year old who caught an adult doing something bad. The sad reality that people will try to get away with this stuff when nobody's watching is definitely something to ponder during those cold, close months of New England winter. And at times, even during the summer.


Here's someone saving a spot on August 1. There is probably an excuse or justification in their heads for this behavior, but the purpose of this blog is survival, not change. Know how to operate so this just annoys you (rather than destroys you).

Your strategy? It's best to save your spot after the first significant snow and observe your neighbors...see if anyone else is getting uppity about their spaces and saving them. It can literally vary from one street to the next. If you're in the right kind of block, maybe you don't need it. (I needed it in South Boston, but didn't need it in Jamaica Plain. On the street I live now, one end you definitely need it and the other end you definitely don't.) When the first significant snowstorm arrives, be sure to grab a spot you don't mind having for the rest of the winter. When you dig it out, leave your old plastic porch chair in its spot, and this place is yours for the next 6 months.* If you don't have an old porch chair, you must acquire one. Make sure it's properly weathered or you'll look like you're from out of town and you will have failed this blog.

* Yes, I said 6 months. With the exception of the occasional summer saver, most spots are saved until the last flake of snow has melted. You'll know when everyone else starts picking up their cones.