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Walsh: Parking ban remains in effect and stop jumping out windows!

Mayor Walsh said today the parking ban on main streets will remain in effect "until further notice."

At his latest snow press conference, Walsh also figuratively wagged his finger at people he said have taken to jumping out of windows into snow banks: Cut that out, he warned. There could be a giant death icicle that's fallen off your roof in that snow bank and what happens when you land on that? "This isn't Loon Mountain, this is the city of Boston," he said.

Walsh urged people to take it easy when shoveling; he said one person had a heart attack while shoveling yesterday and died.

But as long as you're out there, spend 15 minutes shoveling out a hydrant - and help your neighbors out.

He urged people to hire contractors to clear off their roofs - and said that goes double for all you out-of-town landlords.

Walsh again said people who shovel out a space on the street deserve to keep it for a while. "People are shoveling spots out, they're going to have their spaces for a little while."

He added that people who park in spaces somebody else shoveled out should be courteous: Put the space saver back when you leave.

Courtesy also counts on the road: Stop blaring your horn at the driver in front of you when his or her wheels are spinning and obviously aren't getting any traction.

He continued that city officials are beginning to plan for a massive pothole filling season this spring.

In response to a reporter's question, Walsh said that the city will ensure South Boston will have its St. Patrick's parade.

Police Commissioner William Evans said there has been no epidemic of snowblower thefts in the city of Boston.

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Comments

When is the next election? Cant wait for Walsh to be one and done. His idiotic position on space saving (and by extension, his complete lack of knowledge on anything related to transportation policy) is enough to make me a single issue voter.

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Hint: Look up when the last election was and add 4 years to it. That'll give you a ballpark date.

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You should probably Google "rhetorical question"

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Doesn't make it any less stupid.

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You obviously park in a garage, private driveway, or some other solution that makes you incapable of understanding this concept. This is nothing new. Those in Boston who are identified as "Super Voters" are behind Walsh on this 99-1.

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But allowing people to claim public space as their own is terrible public policy. And leads to violence and vandalism.

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Mineral rights on public land, reserving picnic spaces, having private events (weddings, concerts) in public parks, the Super Bowl parade. It's probably only an issue for you when you want to free ride on the back of someone else's labor.

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Um, the reservations you mentioned here are all regulated, scheduled, time-limited, supervised, financially sponsored in most cases, and don't result in vandalism. Your argument is invalid, try again.

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That's different - if you want to have a private event in a public park, you go down to city hall and pay for a permit for a specific timeframe. You can't just reserve it indefinitely, and you can't just stroll down there and declare "THIS IS MINE". Also, if someone tries to use a picnic table you've reserved, you complain to the city, you don't start smashing their picnic basket and throwing food and leaving passive-aggressive notes.

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Uhhmm...who says we DON'T do that when someone steals our picnic tables?

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It's an argument with some merit, but since we've already given that land for free to people to use as private vehicle storage, your comment misses the mark.

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So you made the choice to have a car. And you made the choice to have a car when you dont have a private storage space. So because of your choice, you are now ENTITLED to not only having free parking, but to WASTE that public space when youre not using it so when you come back you can park in the exact same spot?

We need a new word because entitlement just doesnt cover the magnitude of your greed.

Do you have your hand out for all aspects of life, demanding that the public give you free things?

Mine, mine, mine. It's absolutely outrageous.

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You should buy a shovel and dig yourself one. The question isn't whether parking spaces are public or private, but rather, WHICH member of the public has priority in allocating limited public resources. In the case of parking spaces, shoveling one out is akin to securing a permit for an event in a park. You expend the effort, you get exclusive use for a limited amount of time. Want your own spot? Buy a shovel and work a little, you lazy entitled yuppie.

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There are 0 spots on my street unoccupied by a car. This is true for probably 90% of the year. The fact that there is a car encased in snow and ice does NOT make it a free spot. Noone is going to go ahead and dig out someone else's car. So I should, what... Dig a spot off of my roof and park there? So you can take this shovel and shove it up your ass.

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...run by an exasperated mother of four...

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Marty's mom helped write the material. "Stop the nonsense."

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I think we're all collectively& understandably losing our shit a little bit, here.

Also, his statement about courtesy/space savers further proves my point.

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First the Olympics double secret negotiations, now this crap. Someone needs to stop the mayor from endorsing highly illegal, public space hogging. And someone needs to force the police to enforce the law with an iron fist. What do you think would happen if some homeless person, desperate to escape the cold and unable to get to a shelter [thanks again Mayor Bridgefuc*], breaks into a city building for shelter you can bet the police would be there post haste to kick them out and possibly arrest the person. So why are they letting people of means get away with squatting public spaces?

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Actually, Boston Police are very good about getting homeless people to shelter, so probably the wrong analogy to use here.

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This practice was going on long before Marty, and BPD is particularly vigilant about transporting homeless during freezing temps. Nice rant, but you don't know what you're talking about.

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We all know Menino tolerated this, and maybe Flynn, etc., etc., did to. But with each new mayor one has had the opportunity, particularly when the majority of the public want change, to handle it differently. The legislature had passed a law forbidding the practice, fairly recently. And now Mayor Walsh had an option in his first term to say "Follow the law". Instead he is claiming that it is acceptable to flout the law and common decency. That instead of sharing you can be greedy.

And the point about the BPD was not about homeless. It was that if a person tried claiming other public resources, like a portion of city hall or a park for their own exclusive and personal use they would be stopped from doing such. So why is hogging unused parking spaces, public street space, treated as something sacrosanct and above the law?

Another thing about this whole debate that pisses me off is the parochialism of it. This whole yuppie vs. townie or my family goes back here 6 generations where yours does not crap. It's like that Wendy's commercial with the blue collar workers saying "You think you're better than me?". It's not to say space saving is only occurring in certain neighborhoods or by certain people, it's a much more widespread problem. But many of the pro-space saver arguers on here have come in blasting anyone they think doesn't belong in their neighborhood as "yuppies", "entitled", etc. Parking problems are not class warfare. It's about there being too many cars [owned by people of all economic strata] and too little space. You can't make more space without looking like Detroit or Atlanta. So you have to make less cars. I would heartily endorse any mayor [even Walsh] who suggested congestion charges for any car owners inside city limits as a deterrent to such, with the money from such earmarked for public transit improvements to under-served neighborhoods and general maintenance.

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"Walsh again said people who shovel out a space on the street deserve to keep it for a while. "People are shoveling spots out, they're going to have their spaces for a little while.""

Ok. You can have your space. Just don't freaking move your car. It's pretty easy in my book.

See today's story in the Globe about tires being slashed in the South End, where space savers are supposedly banned.

This horrible, horrible practice needs to stop right now.

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but I drove through the South End over the weekend for the first time this winter, and I saw a good number of space savers. Maybe it only took hold on the most well-heeled of streets in the South End.

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Or just don't shovel out your car and then that spot is yours until April. Even if it is in a two hour max parking spot.

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Struck the tone of being both exasperated and good-natured, that I think many of us are feeling. And really appreciated his constant reminders to help out where you can with shoveling out neighbors and fire hydrants.

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If you are against space savers, why don't you just keep circling the same block 40 times till an unsaved spot opens up or park 3 miles from your house?...your call. Don't move someone else's saver and park there. I am really sick and tired of the high and mighty types who think they are too good to save spots (or don't want to go back on their stance from the first storm) so they bitch and moan and benefit from someone else's hard work. Thhhhhhbbbbbdfffftttt!!

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Claiming public property as your own property isn't "high and mighty"?

Explain.

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.

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"Claiming public property as your own" is allowed if the city is ok with it. And Walsh is ok with it, as was Menino and likely every other mayor of the city.

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I'm not happy with the space saver, but as long as the city is going to tow the cars of these kids in the three deckers, leave the snow there and then tell them they all need to move out of Boston until the snow melts then people are going to have to do this space saving.

If Boston was doing the job Brookline is doing at clearing parking spaces this wouldn't be happening.

Walsh isn't the problem -- but the city has been treating big snow storms the same way as long as I've been here. They do the street down the middle and the rest is left up to us the citizens to deal with. Well don't be surprised when this is how people deal with it!

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To be fair, the situation is a little different in Brookline... since there's never overnight parking, it's easier for them to clear things because nobody is leaving their car on the street all night long. And because every car owner in Brookline is required to have some kind of off-street parking set up, there isn't that same Bostonian desperation to get your car back into a spot that may or may not be there when you get home from work.

Of course, the flip side of this is that the rest of the year, when there is no snow, Brookline residents get to deal with the immense pain in the rear that is no overnight parking, so.... :P

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I went to visit a friend in Mission Hill about a week ago. It took me an hour to find some place to park my car and that was halfway up Heath Street. I don't live in that neighborhood, so I don't have a space saved there. I guess if I want to visit them, I should probably go dig out a space and put something in it so that when I visit I don't have to circle the block 40 times or park 3 miles from their place. I mean, once I've dug it out, it's mine, right? Or does proximity to my house matter too? Because nobody told me there were extra rules on this.

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This is pretty much the same comment made in response to the Globe story this morning:

When Southenders heard about the first reported act of vandalism, we immediately set up a youcaring.com page with the goal of raising $600 to support the one victim (a police report must be filed before distributing any funds). We reached the $600 in a matter of hours. Now that we have at least one more incident, we're going to increase our target fund-raising amount to $1500 to help others with their out-of-pocket expenses as well.Anyone who wants to help these victims can visit the site:

http://www.youcaring.com/help-a-neighbor/help-south-end-neighbor-tires-s...

The Mayor's press conference notwithstanding, the Globe articles about this are shining a needed spotlight on recent South End acts of vandalism largely because the South End--with overwhelming support from neighbors--has decided to take a stand in opposition to the practice because intimidation and vandalism are not values most Southenders embrace. But as everyone knows, these acts of entitlement and vandalism occur routinely year after year in Boston's neighborhoods. More often than not victims do not bother to formally report the incident because they think there's nothing the police can do or they fear further retribution. But neighbors talk to other neighbors and word of these criminal acts are shared routinely. Because the South End--in partnership with the city--has launched an initiative to stop and ban the practice, we are publicly exposing the soft underbelly of space saving--that at its essence it's about fear, intimidation, criminal vandalism, and entitlement by threat. Each space saver seen on any Boston street should be viewed as nothing less than a threat and not some folksy act of asking for mutual respect by neighbor and neighborhood. It's not space saver users who deserve "courtesy," it's every resident in every neighborhood who searches for a parking space, and no one deserves acts of vandalism intended to intimidate.

What has been done in the South End--and what these publicized acts of vandalism exemplify--is that when pulling back the curtain on the practice what is left is anathema to building a cohesive and caring community. "I've got mine, you go get yours, and if you touch mine, I'll make you pay" is not the kind of social interaction and community norm Southenders say they want--with a couple of unfortunate exceptions.

The generosity of Southenders (and other generous souls outside the South End) in helping to make victims whole is the real counterpoint to these bullying incidents. Everyone is free to decide on their own who really stands on the side of the angels in this unnecessary and sometimes tragic urban drama.

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be courteous: Put the space saver back when you leave.

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How do you leave when your tires are slashed??

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I will continue blaring my horn at the masshole barreling down in the middle of what now is essentially a one-lane street at 30mph when the speed limit is 20mph.

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I live in Ashmont and parking ban continued after it was lifted from the previous storm due to snow removal. Ban was lifted a week ago and snow has not been cleared or removed since then. Walsh is encouraging space savers because it takes the responsibility off the city to remove the snow themselves. In my opinion, the only way to end this debate and chaos is to for city to step in the remove the snow so everybody can park and not claim the space as their own.

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Amen. Ashmont Street is a mess. What's the point of declaring a ban to begin with if you're not going to widen the road?

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My bet is that the St. Patrick's Day parade will be held on sleighs this year.

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First the Patriots' parade, and now this.

In response to a reporter's question, Walsh said that the city will ensure South Boston will have its St. Patrick's parade.

What is the deal with One Term Marty's unhealthy obsession with parades? Since when is that top priority for a city that has no functional public transit, no safe places to walk, and 22 hour a day gridlock? I swear he must have wanted to be homecoming king soooo bad, and now all he can think about are parades.

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