My Ongoing Parking Woes

I try not to complain too much about first world problems on this blog. But I feel like venting about the parking situation for my apartment building, so I’m going to go ahead and whine about it. (If not here, then where?)

I pay my landlord for a reserved spot behind the building. There’s a municipal parking lot right behind our building, and a portion of that lot is ours. I’m not sure if it’s technically owned by the town, or if our part belongs to our landlord, or how that works. But our area is basically our own mini-lot, with numbered spots that are all clearly marked as “reserved.” The rest of the lot is metered parking, with some other reserved spots for other buildings.

It used to be that the only time I had trouble parking in my own spot was on Friday nights during the summer, when Somerville hosts a classic car show. So, between the classic cars and all the people who come to see them, the lot fills up and people decide to poach the reserved spots. That was a pain, but there wasn’t much I could do about it, and it was only one day a week, for part of the year.

But it’s been getting worse over the years, for a variety of reasons, and, to make a long story short, it’s now pretty much guaranteed that I’ll lose my spot if I go out on Friday or Saturday night, any time of the year, and come back any time before 10pm. And if I’m back before 9pm, I might not find any available spot in the lot. Which means I have to park on the street. But it’s illegal to leave the car on the street overnight, so then I have to go back out again and move it back into the lot once spots open up.

And I’ll often lose my spot on a weeknight, if I go out, or if I get home from work late. It’s getting kind of ridiculous.

So the landlord came up with the idea of issuing everyone a traffic cone with the word “reserved” printed on it. The idea would be that we’d put out the cone any time we left our spot, then toss it in our car when we got home. Well, that lasted about a week before the rotten kids around here started swiping the cones. God knows why. (What are they gonna do with traffic cones?)

I think I need to hire someone to sit in a lawn chair in the middle of my parking spot all day and chase away anyone trying to poach it. And I’ll give the guy a Taser or a can of pepper spray to ward off the rotten kids. (Otherwise, I assume they’d beat up the guy and steal the lawn chair.)

So that’s my “first world problem” rant for the day. I feel a little better now.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.