semi serious question.
I stumbled onto my local metro area’s reddit while trying to look up some historical photos and stared into the abyss for a few mins.
I resisted the urge to leave libreddit and make an account just to reply but, I ran into this post that is basically complaining about having a car in one of the most central neighborhoods in the city, and asking for advice on getting off street parking (in reality, anything that isn’t an overpriced surface lot that offers no protection is going to be quite a hike away from their apartment, there’s no way this will work out).
They claim they work in X first ring suburb where “there are no buses” and that’s why they have to have this car, which is hilarious because they could one seat ride to half of that suburb in under half an hour from a bus that leaves from their front door. the other half it’d be a 2 seat ride but still under 45 mins, and obviously way cheaper than a car. There are also plenty of neighborhoods they could move to that would have less breakins and cheap off street parking, but they seem convinced that’s not the case.
But I digress.
The fellow 
ers in there commiserating about how horribly expensive off street parking is (in a neighborhood that is basically in downtown) got me thinking… If we can’t get city governments to do shit about on street parking and massively unsafe roads, is allowing the street to be so unappealing to park on that people have to actually pay for their giant waste of precious urban land, a viable option to improve things?
this expectation that you should be able to just leave your 2 ton death box lying around in public anywhere for any length of time and nobody will so much as touch it doesn’t apply to any other kind of property (just look at bike theft), and it really fucks with people when you violate that. I feel like that’s a usable weapon, in a way, against gentrification and car dependency and traffic violence.
Were kia boys doing praxis?
As someone who has in the past relied on a public bus to commute, I’ll say that 30 minutes is a dream and my commute temporarily went from 15 minutes to over 60 because when my car broke down and I couldn’t afford to fix it, I had to go in the opposite direction of work and then come back towards work from there due to no direct bus route, and my time to myself at home shrunk even more because the last bus to arrive at work arrived well before my shift started while the first bus to leave after it left a while after it (I don’t remember exactly how far off, this was like 8-9 years ago, but I remember having minimal time to myself or to spend with my partner).
Frankly I could have easily lost my job and possibly ended up homeless, and if someone has destroyed my car on purpose instead of it being bad luck, I’d have been on the verge of
over it.
Unless you’re in one of the like 3 places in the US with good public transit I think this is kinda shitty, and if you do it to a cheap car/poor person’s car, you’re actively a bad person.
realistically yeah petty shit is only going to hurt the people that least deserve it as usual. That was the unserious part for sure. Not that I would do any vandalism but if I were going to it wouldn’t be to random shitboxes, and I haven’t exactly appreciated when it’s happened to me.
I’m definitely happy to see parking treated as the scarce resource that it is though, we have pretty good and rapidly expanding transit service here and I’m sick of people acting like we live in nebraska and they have zero options. If the post said “I work in 2nd/3rd ring suburb and can’t take transit” it’d be different, but this was so egregious