Snowy Selfishness

This post comes from my "evil thoughts I have at random" file, thanks to a week or two of annoying snowy weather (which means in snows for two days and then panic and mayhem set in for another week at least before any of the snow can have a chance to melt away and let us calm the hell down.

Walking in the snow is a bitch.

I'm sure that driving in the snow is a bitch as well. Well, most of me figures that driving after it snows is NOT a bitch because you're inside with the heater on and warm dry feet - but the factor of putting up with the snow and how it affects your car BEFORE you're driving effortlessly through it later makes up in the bitch rating.

I understand - your car is covered in snow. The road is covered in snow. There's a whole lot of snow and ice around and it drives you mad having to deal with it the first time. You sit there and dust your entire car off. Then you have to de-ice things. Then I'm betting you have to dig a bit to allow space for your car to have access driving-wise to the road itself. And once you've pulled it out, you decide to shovel off the rest of the area so your car can theoretically pull back in without requiring post-worktime shoveling.

Here's where you lose me, car-drivers: putting your own property in the space you shoveled as though to claim it for yourself.

I've got news for you, Lewis and/or Clark: you're not a pioneer out claiming untamed wilderness for your own. You've done a nice thing by clearing out a parcel of land where a car could park, but you don't get to stick a flag in it and claim that country in the name of the Griswold family. You've dug up a fresh spot of public land, which is the opposite of private land, and it's open to the public.

While owning a home means ownership of that parcel of land, allowing old-timers the right to yell at kids to stay off their lawns, the street is up for grabs. Any city-dweller knows this, having undoubtedly spent ten minutes on various occasions to find one damned parking spot and it's three blocks away. Because the street parking is open to the public and you're not allower to tell people to move their goobermobiles just because that stretch of curb is the closest to your building and that space three blocks away is Goobermobile Parking Accessible.

Here's the insane part: putting private property on public property, expecting that it turns the public into private rather than turning the private into public!

You know where else you can find private property in public places? The alley behind buildings where furniture doesn't fit into garbage cans. And guess what? Open to the public! Hobos can root around for cans all they want, but that discarded kitchen set could go perfectly in a little crap shack like mine!

So why aren't there more people out there fighting the power?

You pull up to your block, and come caring individual has shoveled out a clearance spot that your car could fit perfectly into. I mean, if it weren't for those two lawn chairs in the middle of the space. What's stopping you from picking up that trash left in the street and tossing it elsewhere, making that parking spot PERFECTLY clear? And maybe those are some nice lawn chairs that would look great in your son's basement collection of crappy furniture on which he and his pot-smoking friends can waste their days lounging? Up for grabs, I say!

Oh, those were YOUR lawn chairs?

I'm afraid I'm going to have to cite precedence in the case of Finders v. Keepers.

Every post-snowday, I have this fantasy of riding in the back of a large pick-up truck and just grabbing all the furniture we can haul. It doesn't belong in the street, and it shouldn't be used as a flag to claim public land as your own private garage. That's why people built garages - to have a private property area to park their cars. I give it a ten-block radius and twenty minutes of driving and I could come home with thirty lawn chairs, fifteen orange cones, and a couple of bucks worth of scrap metal or fodder to start a post-modern art gallery and sell demolished parking-space holders for thousands of dollars.

And then I wake up from my daydream because the bus is here and I have to get to work.

Do you all have these same visions of chair-snatching grandeur? Or are you a car-parking menace trying to pass as an emissary who needs to claim this land in the name of your family? Read more!

ParkMagic or ParkNonsense?

There are 33,000 parking meters on the streets in the city of Chicago. I remember a simpler time, when you pulled up to a meter, whucked in a few quarters to throw time on the clock as needed, and went about your business. You didn't want to come back rushing to feed the meter, so you erred on the side of caution and maybe put in a little extra to make sure you have the time. You finish your business, come back to your car, and while for a second you lament the cents wasted with 12 minutes left on the meter, you consider those pennies better than the amount of a parking ticket, and consider it a charitable gift to whomever pulls their car in during the next 12 minutes.

If you think this "simpler time" is present day, you're sorely mistaken. Welcome to the ParkMagic era.

ParkMagic is an Ireland-based company with a U.S. site in Michigan. Basically the program entails a beeper-looking device that you buy and initially load with $15 or more. As you pull up to a parking meter, you then call this number, punch in your beeper information and the zone of your meter (yes, there are ZONES now, more on that in a minute), and it downloads to your beeper with a countdown instead of the meter. Now, instead of running to the meter to feed it more, you dash to your cellphone to call back up and dial in more money. Supposedly in the future, if this becomes mainstream, you'll be able to receive e-mails of traffic and availability as well as RECEIVE calls from your meter when it's close to expiring.

Some people may see this as a vast improvement, mostly because they don't need quarters anymore. I see it as nothing but a nuisance and digital nonsense.

For starters, the ZONES. I already am loathed at the idea that the city can just decree that just for arriving in the city and wanting to do business and stimulate the economy, you must pay for the privilege of leaving your car. We really are just a few steps away from tolls just to enter the precious city space. Sorry, city, but you're just slabs of pavement and asphalt and hobo urine - so GET OVER YOURSELF and just let me park the damned car. There used to be a STANDARD rate of coinage in a meter in relation to time allowed to park there. Now there are ZONES, from 1 to 6, which dictate how much time a quarter (oh, I'm sorry - 25 electronic cents) will get you. Zone 1 allows five whole minutes, Zone 2 is ten, Zone 3 is fifteen, Zone 4 is twenty, Zone 5 is thirty and Zone 6 allows for an hour.

If technology of today is any indicator, parking at a Zone 1 meter will mean that within 60 seconds, you'll need to be dialing in the number again to go through the menus and wait time due to call volume in order to ensure that your next 5-minute payment goes through before your meter runs out.

Of course, I'm sure that you can pay for more than 5 minutes at a time, but my point stands. Ten seconds to whuck in change, versus four minutes of phone menus to hope that everything works right and your beeper registers your payment.

Here's where a big truckload of nonsense comes into play: everyone is treating this like the city of Chicago is LOSING money somehow on these meters and that the new system will fix everything.

First off, the city starts LOSING money because now a share of the parking meter revenue gets split with ParkMagic. Doesn't anyone know business anymore? The more people you bring in on a deal, the more partners you have to share the profits with. Try watching ONE heist film and then tell me it's a smart idea to bring in some new jackass who wants a cut of the money. He'll probably shoot you and take YOUR cut, too. *shakes fist at ParkMagic* I'm not falling for that one again!!!

Secondly, too much emphasis is being put on cents and minutes and LIES. Take this quote from the ParkMagic CEO: "People pay for one hour. If they come back in an hour and fifteen minutes and get a ticket, they feel bad about it. If they don't get a ticket, the city has just lost 25 percent of an hour [worth of revenue]." Okay, assuming that you're willing to nitpick over the fact that the city loses that fifteen minutes in revenue (eight cents), that needs to be compared to the FREE money that the city gets from overpaying at a meter and leaving before time expires. You can't simply argue that it doesn't count, because someone else will pull into that spot and NOT pay money because time's still on the meter; we're using the same logic of "if that thing happens in this way" like the failure to issue a ticket, and the city hasn't even LOST money because the meter is fed and that's money for the city no matter whose car is parked there.

It's also a foolish idea to base this on the failure to issue tickets, which we ALL know is NOT the case. Even at a rate of two tickets per hour, I have a feeling that this revenue for the city not only pays for the meter agent's wages for the hour, but also counteracts all of those missed-eight-cents meters. I'm also pretty sure that more than two tickets are written per hour by each agent.

Thirdly, doesn't this go against everything that our politicians have been talking about? I may not have the best memory in the world, but wasn't it not too long ago that my favorite nemesis alderman was trying to ban radar detectors because they could be used to warn drivers of speed cameras? Didn't that alderman admit, point blank, that all of those tickets weren't just something that brought in revenue for the city - they were downright PART OF THE BUDGET?

So how is it that the aldermen are fine with this ParkMagic program? They lose money from the meters because the new partner gets a cut, and they're admittedly welcoming in a system that would potentially reduce the number of meter-related parking tickets by a drastic amount. Something just really doesn't seem right here. I mean, it seems completely right if you're a driver in the city of Chicago - which is what's baffling me. Maybe I'm just not used to programs potentially helping actual citizens (I mean, until the lack of ticket money creates a deficit that needs to be made up for by inevitably creating higher taxes).

I can't shake the feeling that this will bite us all in the ass.

Of course, I could be wrong. I don't even drive or own a car...

(The article about ParkMagic)







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