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Citizen complaint of the day: The old hide-a-hydrant parking trick

Hidden hydrant in East Boston

An outraged citizen filed a 311 report about this situation on Marion Street in East Boston:

Car has illegally put a recycle bin over a fire hydrant so they could park in front of it. The trash from recycle bin is now all over sidewalk. Please tow and remove recycling bin. Highly illegal!

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Comments

Ignoramuses use space savers all year round in East Boston, in fact they're famous for it. But this idiocy is a new one on me. Did they really think this was fooling anybody?

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Famous for saving the planet.

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Maybe the driver of the car did it, maybe not. We don't know. We know the car didn't do it.

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I suppose the driver will leave a space saver after vacating the space.

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Why didn’t the outraged citizen remove the barrel, thus making the ruse noticeable to everyone.

Still, a dick move by the driver.

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The submitter probably felt that leaving the evidence for the police was more critical than unconcealing the fire hydrant, for the time it would take the police to respond.

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Meanwhile, if the ruse was successful, various patrol cars would drive by without noticing that there was a hydrant there.

Of course, as is often noted with other 311 stories, the citizen would have gotten the reaction they claim they want by using their phone to call 911 (and tell the dispatcher to connect them with the BPD.) Or they could do what they did and hope Adam caught it.

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At first it's funny -- haha only in Boston would someone do something this crazy -- but then if you think about it, whoever did this is basically pissing all over the social contract that holds our society together. I have no clue what sort of charges would be brought for something like this, but I think it ought to be punished more harshly than theft -- there's no way you can do something like this and not be at least moderately evil.

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Same thing with parts of New York and New Jersey.

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Same for the slobs who destroy those lime
Bikes

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same for those slobs who leave those Lime bikes everywhere.

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Yeah, leaving a bicycle somewhere is clearly on the same level of evil as concealing a fire hydrant and parking illegally next to it.

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That's not what I said.

You (or another anon) first equated the bike.issue to the hydrant issue.

If anything obstructing public thruways like sidewalks with private profit-making property is actually closer to.obstructing a fire hydrant since they can impede emergency response and in general make public space more crowded and dangerous.

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Amen. The public does not owe these companies free public space on which to store their crappy bikes. That's what this boils down to. While the exact location of that public space changes pretty regularly (which is how they get away with this) they're still using public space for their own profit without paying for it.

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Nope, sorry. You're making stuff up.

A small movable thing being on the sidewalk is not as bad as hiding a hydrant and parking a car next to it. *You* can declare it dangerous and an impedance to emergency response, but that doesn't make it so.

And if you're going to freak out about things on a sidewalk, you'll need to start with the recycle bins themselves.

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multiplied by 20, strewn about the sidewalk.

it's not nothing and I'm not just "making it up".

if any other business wanted to just set up shop with no permits, paying no taxes, on an equivalent amount of public space that the bike shares use, they would be shut down real quick.

the entire premise of the business is to commandeer public space, piecemeal, for a private enterprise. does that really seem reasonable and without consequence to you?

the recycling bins are put out at determined and limited intervals, because they are linked to a city service. yes, there are people who leave them out too long, who let them wander off. but the service itself isn't built upon recycling bins constantly occupying public space. that's the difference.

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Its an East Boston tradition, like double parking in southie. People have died because of the illegal parking in southie that is not enforced bc its 'tradition', so of course this sort of self absorbed behaviour going to spread to other neighborhoods.

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The double parking thing annoys me, but at least the cars aren't blocking the access to a fire hydrant. Those things are there for a reason. I guess you can just pray that there's never a fire at your house.

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The double parking in southie blocks emergency vehicles (a girl died a few years back b/c some turds double parking blocked ambulance access) and peoples parking too close to the intersection blocked sight-lines and a boy was killed.

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People seem to think as long as there's a gap, they're not doing anything wrong - instead they're just blocking both the hydrant and the travel lane.

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version of a Mentos ad.

Mentos. The Freshmaker!

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How do they know the car did it? I say it was a random act of beligerent vandalism.

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They forgot to file an additional 311 complaint against the property associated with the bin - putting TRASH in a recycling bin!!!

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