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Citizen complaint of the day: Piggie parker stakes out four spaces before snow starts

Space savers in Andrew Square, South Boston

An annoyed citizen complains about somebody on Mohawk Street off Preble in Andrew Square early this afternoon:

Man saved FOUR parking spots before show even falls.

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Comments

Fine the space - saver for littering. However you feel about saving a space you shoveled, this behavior is clearly out of bounds.

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Just move his stuff. Are you terrified of the guy or something? Your neighbors will take your side.

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Great idea. It's not like anyone would ever vandalize a car who parked in "their" space after the items were moved, right? That sort of behavior is unheard of in a civilized town like Boston.

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The vandals.

At least this way there action will be entirely senseless and very criminal.

To be more realistic, this is an economic issue. Free parking has encouraged cars. The government (Boston) has not stepped in resulting in other forms of regulation (neighborly considerations/talking to people, using cones, parking on curbs, or acts of vandalism as retaliation).

If one were interested in quicker government intervention then perhaps the solution is removing cones. It will turn a minor issue into a major one, at least that is what it sounds like from here...

One way or another, it will be regulated by some means.

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Is that why Henry Ford created Model T.

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What came first, the Space Saver or the Space?

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Were invented so you wouldn't have to walk, ride a horse or ride a bike.

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It may be the vandals' fault but it's some innocent person's car that is damaged. I don't know about you, but I don't want to deal with my insurance going up and filing a police report, etc. because some entitled asshole thinks predicted snow means it's Wild West justice out there.

I'd personally not move someone's space saving junk ESPECIALLY if I didn't intend to park there because I don't want to be the cause of a completely uninvolved person getting their headlights smashed in retaliation.

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Bullying works?

You wouldn't be responsible for how someone else behaves, or misbehaves.

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In theory, I want to stand up to that bully. In practice, it means my car potentially getting vandalized and having to deal with all that mess and in all likelihood NO consequences for the bully because there would be no proof. So he either learns that bullying works, or that vandalism goes unpunished in this city. IMO, that's a toss up.

And no, I'm not willing to make the choice for someone else to unwittingly stand up to a bully, either.

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Reverse Vandalism

Wait and see who comes back, moves the space and goes into their house. Then slash the tires, or dump ash in his vents. Leave a passive aggressive note about taking public property and to expect the same again.

And why not? If the threat of vigilante violence and property damage is being condoned by the city, lets all get in on the ride down the cesspool. It's the only thing you can do when faced with a city government that ignores city and state law.

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OK, then live in fear of this guy and park a mile from your house so he can have 4 spaces. If he messed with my car I'd just do the same back to his.

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Is a stretch... Two compact cars probably, and yes i would toss the cones in the trash, and the trash can on his/her front lawn.

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Putting the cones back on the offender's lawn just means they can do it again. You have to dispose of them somewhere else entirely.

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We have a few year-round space savers on our street. After failing to convince the city to pick them up, I started moving the savers a few blocks away during my walks on trash pick up days. As you might imagine, new savers would appear. I would dispose of those new savers the next week, the cycle repeated. Eventually I just gave up. The offenders were quite a ways from my house so it didn't matter to me that much. If they were next door, however, I would have to try to talk to them about it, even though I suspect it would accomplish nothing good.

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The city really needs to do something about this.

For every space saver the city allows to 'slide' like this, it says to two or more OTHER people "I guess this is accepted practice to do so, so I guess I will also". Meaning "if someone else can, so can I"

You know people are going to think and be like that...

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Pretaliation. People will start sabotaging "saved" spaces with tire-wrecking trash.

Wait for it ...

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Realistically, Will the DPW take the time to drive around and pick up "savers" while preparing for this afternoon's storm? Neighbors need to be proactive, if you are afraid of your neighbors, get creative.

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Are you sure these savers are there due to the impending snow? You can't save a shoveled out space before you shovel it. I think they are probably there as a matter of course with or without snow, just like in my East Boston neighborhood. The old timers of the neighborhood use space savers summer and winter.

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That is Mohawk Street....that guy is a nut!!

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there is a perfectly good bucket to throw the cones into...

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Not necessarily there because of the snow. There have been loads of savers out lately, lots of moving trucks, pods, and dumpsters for construction. If there is not permit sign from the city just move them. That's what I do and nothing has ever happened to me.

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Maybe the guy was picking up some trash that was on the street before the street is filled with snow. To be safe, he put out cones both in front of and behind where he was working, noted by the barrel. For all we know, he was merely taking a break before resuming his work and just forgot to move everything.

Okay, it's some a-hole "pre-saving." I've never been a space marker in my street parking days, but I respect those who don't want their work to end up for naught. There is literally no work involved with this. At that, there is still some snow in the space area. I mean, come on.

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http://www.emedco.com/tape-barricades-cones/cones/traffic-work-zone/refl...

Were they stolen from the city or did he really fork out the cash for these?. I don't see a need for these in my emergency kit.

I have to admit when I was 12 years old I grabbed a cone that one of the utility trucks left behind for a few days. Used it as a part of my slalom course for my bike ;)

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I am so tired of hearing people complain about space savers. Are you actually affected by this--unable to find a place to park--or are you just walking by on your way to the bus and then have nothing better to do than fiddle with your smart phone and report this "problem?" Is this street near a snow emergency route? Is it likely the Mayor will declare a snow emergency before the person who was parked there gets home from work? Well then, it makes sense to me that a person would, when they left for work, mark the space in front of their house, where they park their car every night, to discourage someone forced to move off the snow emergency route from taking the space and leaving the resident stuck parking blocks away overnight.
I know that "logic" offends the sensibilities of people here who think space savers are evil, but there are bigger problems in the world. If you live in the neighborhood, you figure out what the customs are and work with it. If you are a visitor, well certainly you don't deserve somebody slashing your tires, but don't treat the neighborhood like it is just there to provide a place for you to park your car for free while you shop or take the train downtown. I'm not saying anybody has a "right" to save spaces, but I would just laugh at the audacity of this and move on.

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It out of town yuppies.

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I know it's pretty obvious I don't know South Boston from, well, me, but I thought the invading yuppie hordes were still marching down Broadway from the west, not trying to open up a second front on the south through the Polish Triangle.

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The one who wanders around Andrew Square shirtless with a giant swastika tattoo.

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Second front as described is accurate, we are coming

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What you are missing is that hoarding, i.e. in times of scarcity taking more of something than you need, is sociopathic behavior which, if allowed or encouraged, makes things significantly worse for everyone.

If you need 16 hours per day of parking and you use space savers to take 24, then it's hoarding.

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There are areas of "South Boston Resident Parking" in Fort Point that commuters from other parts of Southie use ... and leave space savers OVERNIGHT.

In other words, they are unoccupied for fourteen to sixteen out of 24 hours.

With an increase in actual residences in the area, that practice seems to be dwindling ... but I still see it when I walk down A street and some of my husband's coworkers who live in that area do complain about it because it is ridiculous.

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I am so tired of hearing people complain about space savers.

You know you're not required to read every thread on UHub, right? Adam does a pretty good job with the titles so you can completely ignore the topics you're sick of.

Also, if you're tired of hearing about it, it's pretty counter-productive to complain about complaining about space savers.

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It's a sign of deterioration in society.

Sure, that's an overstatement, but if you cannot comprehend the idea that has been floating around that people are assuming public spaces are their own, I will have to overdramatize it.

In the middle of the local opinion, there is a consensus that "if you shoveled it out, it is yours." The other end is that no one has any rights, regardless of how much effort went into essentially clearing the street out. The end you seem to be endorsing is that it doesn't matter how much effort went into shoveling, if any, it is their space.

The city, as a collective unit and not any individuals or property owners, own and have rights to that space. When people start claiming spaces like this (and yes, they do it in the summer, people complain, Adam posts the complaints, and commenters go to down), they are claiming what is not theirs.

Again, I feel I speak for the majority when I say "if you shovel it out, it's yours," but the first flake hasn't fallen yet.

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are the people who don't live in the City. These whiners from Medford, Quincy etc. who have multiple car driveways are trying to tell us city folk what we can and cannot do. The same people who you see on vacation in the Caribbean and tell you they're "from" Boston.
The Mayor says we can use space savers for a couple of days. You don't like it? Don't vote for him the next election. Oh wait, you can't vote for him.

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Yes, Nona, that all makes perfect sense. You're obviously a highly intelligent individual. It's only "whiners" from the suburbs who drive into residential Boston neighborhoods, take pictures of space savers, and submit them to Citizens Connect, just because they have nothing better to do. Obviously, all Boston residents love it when their selfish douchebag neighbors put out space savers before the snow even falls, just like the Mayor always said they could.

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Question: Let's say a mayor directed the police not to arrest people for public urination. Would that make it legal to pee in public? Would that make it a nice or respectful or neighborly thing to do?

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That's completely irrelevant. Neither Menino nor Walsh ever said it was OK to save spaces before the snow falls.

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And they haven't really said that it's OK to save spaces afterwards, only that the city isn't going to start removing space savers until 48 hours after the storm.

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My wife and I are over 50; I've lived in the city for 25 years and she's lived here all her life; we both think that people trying to save parking spaces on a public street are acting selfishly and thoughtlessly, possibly because they simply don't grasp the concept of sharing a public resource. I shovel out my car after every storm; I have never tried to use a space saver.

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I live in the city, lived here for 32 of my 36 years and I think the practice is ridiculous and selfish and contributes to the general "us vs. them" mentality in neighborhoods that is only getting worse. If you want assured parking, YOU'RE the one who should move to Medford.

And believe me, the day I vote for Marty Walsh and his union-owned ass is the day I sell my soul and start cheering for the fucking Yankees.

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No, it doesn't. We don't pay city taxes to have your garbage laying around our streets. Buy yourself a parking space or get rid of your car if you're going you're succumb to using space-savers.

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Can anyone who's from a large northern city (Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, etc.) tell
us if this "space saver" behavior occurs elsewhere besides Boston?

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I was JUST talking to a friend in Madison Wisconsin who also has seen the 'space saver' thing pop up.

I think they also do in Chicago too.

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You're from Belmont.

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I can understand why you might think that but actually
I'm the 3rd race in the Triple Crown. (You can look it up.)

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Dibs.

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I used to live in Wilmington, Del., not far from that city's Little Italy, and space-savers were a common sight in that neighborhood.

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I had a rich friend that purchased a half dozen clunkers, got them all registered and inspected and totally legal so they had no excuse to tow them.
Then he would park it in an a holes space like that, sit back and enjoy.

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Your "friend" (who im going to assume is imaginary) purchased cars so he could watch people not able to park in the spot? If so tell you "friend" i said he's i complete loosha!

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I googled "loosha" and this is what they came up with.

http://cdn.staticneo.com/w/layton/5/50/Loosha.png

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Nope, he was a real lawyer who had his car keyed.......so he took every spot near the guy who did it. All were legal, he moved them around so no one sat and could be called abandoned. Sometimes, you just don't know who your screwing with.

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Seems to me that if he was a real lawyer, he could have caused a lot more trouble for the guy through the legal system.

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n/t

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Moving a bunch of beaters around from space to space every couple of days? Maybe it's just me, but I think the "fun" would diminish sharply after the first or second iteration.

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Yeah, my friend did the same thing. My other friend is a cop and he arrested a bunch of space saving dickwads. Then I had my gangbanger friend beat up some other space savers and turn their apartment into a stash house. Then my friend Will LaTuilippe and I murdered a few other space savers, along with some petty thieves and people who didn't return their library books on time. It was so cool.

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densely populated neighborhoods. There are folks on my street in Roslindale who regularly put out space savers, snow or not.

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If you were really from around here you would know that's the setup for a game of "conesey."

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Saving a parking space with a cone or leaving your car in the same spot for weeks on end. When I left for work this morning nobody had moved their cars. When I came home the cars are still there and they'll be there a long time after the snow stops. If the Yups aren't going to need their cars they should get rid of them.
I can't wait for street cleaning to start so these inconsiderates have to move their vehicles every other week.

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Except one thing's actually a vehicle and the other is a lawn chair.

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Watch the space to see who moves their car into it, watch which building they then enter, note the address then call the cops.

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And then watch the SWAT team show up.

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I mean really....How stupid can people get ? This is going too far, imho.

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