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Bus passengers get out and move car blocking their journey in the Back Bay
By adamg on Sat, 02/14/2015 - 12:04pm
Nate Fedor, who watched the whole thing unfold, reports that when a charter bus got stuck trying to turn from Dartmouth Street onto Beacon shortly after 10 a.m. and then just sat there for about 15 minutes, passengers who could wait no longer finally got out of the bus and picked it up and moved it about two feet, just enough for their driver to maneuver the bus onto Beacon.
Not everybody was impressed, at least not by the bus driver. Gerald Burke wrote:
Where did bus driver get his license? This was an impossible angle for the turn.
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Comments
Neat Story
Always nice to see people come together to solve a problem.
Now could someone remind me again why the city has decided to do nothing about illegal parking since the first blizzard?
Maybe the city should do
Maybe the city should do something about all the snow that's causing people to park like this. People are making do with what they're being given by their vaunted city government. If you want something to get angry about, there's that.
See?
It's bullshit entitlement like this that is so much a part of the problem.
The city is dealing with it -- by clearing the road for travel. Carting the snow away is extremely expensive and is a low priority in residential areas. If you feel so passionately that it needs to be done you are welcome to chip in.
If you can't park the way you want it doesn't give you the right to break the law and make everyone else's life worse by parking in the street. Would it be OK to double park for many hours/days in the middle of the summer? If not then why is OK now.
Beacon St pre-dates cars. Parking isn't critical -- traveling is. The city has no obligation to ensure parking is available but they do have an obligation to ensure that the streets remain passable.
How much do you use your car?
I have friends who live in Medford, but still rent out their first condos in Somerville. They are storing cars for their tenants in their Medford driveways.
Ditto for one of my neighbors - friends car in the driveway.
If you aren't using your car very much, this might be an option. Somerville is encouraging people to do this, too, because it alleviates the parking problem.
Perhaps Boston needs to start suggesting these things, too. You aren't entitled to a spot because you have a sticker, and maybe you can put your car somewhere else.
No one is making anyone park
No one is making anyone park like this. If there isn't enough space to park, park somewhere else!
Where exactly?
I am fortunate enough to have a driveway. Most of my neighbors do not. Where are people who don't have driveways supposed to park, when entire neighborhoods look like this? The only streets around here that are cleared to the curb are on streets that don't allow parking anyway. And many roads aren't particularly cleared for travel either.
I never thought I'd become a parking apologist, but if the snow is too excessive for the city to handle (and I accept that it is), then it's too excessive to expect people to find magical parking.
Exactly why the Redevelopment Board is wrong
The Boston Redevelopment Board has stupidly been approving new buildings with inadequate parking. In times like these when street spaces are less available than the best case scenarios used in proposals, old formulas of units/bedrooms to parking spaces prove correct, and bicycle parking spaces not so much.
Why should new buildings pay for this?
The problem is too many cars and too few spaces, then that is solved by finding a way to reduce the number of cars through car sharing, reliable transit, and putting a price on the use of public property for storage of private vehicles.
Why should new buildings foot the entire cost of the problem they didn't cause?
Yes!
Between the lack of parking and the way the T has been running over capacity, it is clear that we are beyond maxed out on "transit oriented development," aka allowing developers to cram oversized, luxury condos with little/no parking into every nook and cranny in the city. I welcome the people who live there to the neighborhood- it's not their fault - but wish that the developers who make a fortune off of these buildings were required to put their money where their T-friendly mouths are and contribute a portion of their profits into a trust to fund MBTA improvements.
Don't get me wrong, it
Don't get me wrong, it totally sucks! I've seen some crazy things the past few weeks; cars parked close to the middle of the street, some with the noses sticking out way too far. Instead of pulling over for each other, people are playing chicken and having stand-offs, flying around pedestrians, I could go on. That SUV could have gotten higher up on the snowbank. Parking has been terrible, but if you can't park safely, you should go somewhere else. I have had to get rides or Uber a lot lately, because of parking. You gotta do what you gotta do.
See how that works?
We have a winner! Disallowing parking on the streets, results in streets getting cleared.
As for where to park, yeah it's tough but the common good is best served by clear streets. Tax breaks for pay-garages to be built. Sucks but as someone else posted, being able to travel on the street is more important than being able to park on the street.
Parking ban ok
I'd be fine with a rolling parking ban if they'd actually clear the streets.
I just looked at the parking garage locations. Says they offer discounted parking for cars with residents stickers.
Our neighborhood doesn't do resident stickers. So now where do we park?
It is a legal parking space,
It is a legal parking space, would it be againts the law to tamper with other peoples property.would if these bus passengers did some damage to this suv.why could'nt the bus driver call the police or tow truck to handle it.
No, It's Illegally Parked, More Than Twelve Inches From The Curb
Did you look at the picture? Even if a tow truck could get through traffic to the scene, how's it going to hook up to the car and move it?
And you have to leave 10 feet from the travel lane
Or 12 feet?
But buses should probably avoid these areas for now either way.
No way to go
Dartmouth & Beacon has only one way to go: westbound on Beacon. That's it. You could back up to Marlborough, which is a shitshow of snow, or all the way to Comm Ave. I'm sure backing up would have been very easy to do with Boston's patient drivers and streets devoid of snow piles.
Not sure why the bus driver is being criticized for the city not being able to plow a street wide enough for five lanes (two for parking)!
Then What?
I kind of agree with Gerry, are you going to do this at every intersection. I'm not that familiar with the area though. What's considered illegal parking. The car looks like it's more than 20 ft from the intersection. Every car in the city is now more than one foot from the curb, so there's alot of revenue potential there. It's a frustrating mess for sure, but some people aren't increasing their meds enough.
Big Road
Beacon St. in Back Bay is a wide artery. It's three travel lanes plus two parking lanes. Back Bay doesn't believe in space savers -- or shoveling out spots for that matter. They'll park in the travel lanes until the snow melts. So now the road is down to about single travel lane.
The city doesn't give a shit. Not a single car has been or will be ticketed or towed. Unclear if this is due to incompetence, laziness, or just that Walsh doesn't want to piss off the richest part of town. Regardless everyone has had to ensure horrible traffic for weeks as a result.
Both sides of Comm. Ave. in
Both sides of Comm. Ave. in Back Bay are marked with tow signs with no times or dates. If that happened elsewhere there would be mass outrage on uhub. Here, we deal with it either by moving cars or dealing with the consequences. No one space saves and no one slashes tires. I'm pretty damn sure a lot of towing is going to happen before tonight for snow removal which is why the signs ate posted. I saw plenty of cars being towed in this neighborhood after the last blizzard so you can relax about that. Furthermore, there is constant ticketing and towing year round in the Back Bay. Anyone who lives here will vouch for that. As regards to the lack of shoveling, I'll agree with you on that point -- many people are letting their cars sit underneath 3 feet of snow, however I've also seen PLENTY of neighbors shoveling sidewalks and getting together to dig out cars just like any other neighborhood. Big deal. So what. This fantasy of Back Bay being some sort of utopia of uber wealthy trust funders is all in your head. Lastly, Back Bay falls behind South End and Beacon Hill in terms of expensive places to live.
Oh Yeah?
Look at the wide angle photo posted above. You can see about 20 cars all blocking the travel lane and not a single ticket. (Parking tickets are bright orange and could be seen if there were any.)
I ride and/or drive down Commonwealth Ave every day. The travel lane has been blocked by cars every single day since the blizzard three weeks ago. Never once have I seen a ticket. I have seen crippling traffic including police/fire trucks stuck as people can't even more far enough over to the side of the road to let them pass.
You also don't see a single parking spot shoveled out, space saver or not. At least in the parts of the city known for space saving people at least make an effort to shovel out parking spots and not just shrug and park completely in the road.
I assume you mean they picked up the car
Not the bus (as the sentence implies)
Cars are easy to slide
The following scenario happened a couple of months back. I was visiting a friend in Hanover, NH and we didn't have enough parking. The reason was that his driveway had space for four cars, but space 3 was occupied by a car that was not only dead, but whose owner had left it there for a few months without the keys, so we couldn't get in and pop it in to neutral and roll it forwards. He had two cars, and mine was the odd car out. No street parking. Basically, driveway looked like this:
ROAD-SPACE1–SPACE2-DEADCAR-EMPTY
What we needed to do was to push DEADCAR in to the EMPTY space, so that we would then have three spaces left for the three cars. One of the three mobile cars was a 15-year-old Volvo, the other two were "nice" cars. I convinced him that the following would work: we took the Volvo and pulled it forwards until it was bumper-to-bumper with the dead car (with a foam camping pad in between the bumpers, because I usually have one of those in my car). Once touching, I revved the engine to 2000 RPM in first gear and the dead car—in park, with some snow and ice under the wheels—easily slid the 10 or 15 feet we needed it to to get three cars in to the driveway.
So, with the state of Boston's roads right now, I highly doubt that there will be much issue sliding a car a few feet one way or another. The bus passengers were just lucky that there was space in front of the car, as opposed to, say, an 8 foot snow bank.
charter bus driver
Its next to impossible to drive a car in the city of Boston...with all of this snow & you are fauling the driver for taking a turn on what is concidered to be a major roadway???
What is wrong with you people blaming the driver of this charter bus !
space savers
As much as people love to hate space savers, at least here in Oak Square residents have been maintaining their spots, keeping close the the curb and travel lanes open. At least on the side streets. On Washington (a snow emergency street) nobody has shoveled out anything---why would they?---and traffic now regularly backs up any time a bus or truck has to make a slight turn on he winding road.