Overnight Onstreet Parking

[campster]

I learned about avalanches and slate roofs the hard way. I have a steeply-pitched slate roof which dumps avalanches on our driveway. Just after we moved in, a ton of icy snow fell on our Honda Civic. It broke the windshield, completely crushed the roof and destroyed the power sunroof. Total damage was $5600! Thank cod I still had collision/comprehensive which I had been toying with eliminating just the week before. Luckily, the insurance company paid out no problem and never even raised our premiums and the auto body place, which did take a while, did a phenomenal job. They even cleaned the interior and waxed and buffed the body.

Now I have to make sure whenever there's a snowstorm to put the car outside the range of the roof. Would use the garage but of course it's always full of junk.

[jencoleslaw]

"snow clips." these are things we learn on the OTHER side of town.

[campster]

"snow clips." these are things we learn on the OTHER side of town.

[gregw]

"snow clips." these are things we learn on the OTHER side of town.

[jencoleslaw]

Ya mean those thingies that keep snow from sliding off the roof? Great, except that it's not my roof that's dumping the snow. The guys who own it are -- ahem -- entrepreneurs who live in Boston. Believe me, I've seen no evidence that they're interested in anyone else's problems but their own.

[campster]

i'm no lawyer but i would imagine that anything that falls off their house and damages something on your property would, in fact be their problem.

[jencoleslaw]

One would think -- but zoning tells me that, since the driveway is a latecomer (past ten or twelve years) it just ain't so.

[campster]

but, how can that be? if you were standing in that spot and you were hit by a blast of icy snow, the insurance company of the house next door would certainly be liable. I would imagine that even if your driveway was out of compliance with zoning, there still is a responsibility by next door not to break your sh*t on your own property...

[jencoleslaw]

well, the next time you invite everyone over for a COCKtail i'm totally going to get hit with something off their roof to finance my dessert spa.

[megk]

well, the next time you invite everyone over for a COCKtail i'm totally going to get hit with something off their roof to finance my dessert spa.

[runawayjim]

Dessert spa? *perk*

[campster]

well, the next time you invite everyone over for a COCKtail i'm totally going to get hit with something off their roof to finance my dessert spa.

[jencoleslaw]

Now, now, there'll be none of that! And meanwhile, you may need to LUbricate your shift key. I think it got stuck there, for a moment!

(Although a dessert spa might be a nice fit on the corner...)

[campster]

btw, i checked with a lawyer who said that if you've complained about the snow and ice before then you might have a case, but if this is an "unforseeable" accident (which i think a case can be made for it being foreseeable because we all know what happens with snow and slate roofs, but whatever) then you can't sue. there is also some question on whether this is an act of cod as well. So, there ya go.

[jencoleslaw]

Yeh -- that's pretty much the response I got when zoning transferred me to the city's legal department. But (to steer this ever-so-gently back on topic) my point is that, if cars were allowed to park on the street, there would be somewhat less of a likelihood that ~1000 lbs. of snow would fall on any given car in a single moment. And if it did, that could be pretty reasonably be called an act of cod.

'Cause I'm not the only one who has this problem, what with parking jammed between 19th-century buildings and no shortage in Providence of slate roofs...

[runawayjim]

of course, if we all parked on the streets we'd be at the mercy of parking bans and snow plow blades...

[jencoleslaw]

that's what snow emergencies are for. on most streets (not the narrow ones) they can do an odd or even ban on certain days during the winter. meaning you can only park on one side of the street. they do something like that in manchester, NH. and if there's no parking ban and a snow plow hits your car, the city is liable.

[inProv]

even if we were to adopt overnight on street permitted parking, it probably already would only be on one side of the street because so many of providence's residential streets are so narrow, so i suspect a parking ban would be a complete parking ban, and folks would still need to figure out what to do with their cars when there is one.

[runawayjim]

How do the folks in other cities like Boston cope with these problems?

[campster]

of course, if we all parked on the streets we'd be at the mercy of parking bans and snow plow blades...

but i digress. When are we having drinks on your porch?

[inProv]

Poppycock! I lived in a house in Cambridge, with no driveway whatsoever, on a narrow one-way street for five years, and there weren't any parking bans, because resident parking on the street was a given. You had 24 hours to create visible evidence that you'd shovelled your car out and moved it (if only three feet back and forth), or you'd be ticketed. You could count on having to dig out of a heavy, crusty snowbank. Period. This was a pain in the butt for me, simply because the main reason I owned a car at all was that I used to, um, defer doing laundry for so long at times that I couldn't find enough machines in town to do it all at once. So, I used to take the laundry to New Hampshire every four months or so, where there was a great big laundromat with those nice Swedish machines, and plenty of 'em. And the incentive to do the laundry was that, after it was done, a hike up Pack Monadnock was a mile away. (I'm not joking. With Filene's Basement a couple subway stops away from home, it was easier to buy new clothes than to do laundry. Probably cheaper, too, what with finding things on the third or fourth markdown. I left there with a lot of clothes, yeh -- but I'll never have to shop again unless I want to. And I have a laundry room in the basement now, so the vast majority of them are even clean most of the time. I have become tremendously bourgeois in my old age.)

As far as snow plow blades go, my experience has been that they are never a danger to parked cars unless the plow's driver drives the plow into the car. I'm sure this may occasionally occur, but I have never known it to happen to anyone in my neighborhoods in Cambridge or Boston. That's not a scientific sample, so I don't know how often it really happens there, but if I were a gamblin' man, I'd put my money on more cars being damaged in driveways in Providence below slate roofs than are damaged by plows in Boston/Cambridge in any given snow "event".

A bad plow-truck driver can eventually be brought to circumstances. But your neighbor's slate roof is eternal. And it will strike any chance it gets.

The thing about the Boston-area resident permit plan is that, yeah, it's a revenue stream, and that's great. But to allow overnight parking on the street is also to allow residents the opportunity to not pave significant portions of relatively small yards. The ability to simply park in front of the house (or at least somewhere on the block) is a disincentive to pave your green yard.

In my immediate neighborhood in the past two years, there's been a pandemic of overpaving back yards. Take a look at what non-resident landlords have done in back of 131 through 137 Doyle Avenue recently. (Street numbers subject to my poor memory, but very close. Go look, you'll see what I mean quite easily.) I'm gonna estimate that 97% of these houses' backyards are blacktopped. And Doyle Avenue backyards are HUGE. Zoning mandates no more than 50% of the backyard paved when "developed" for off-street parking. This is never enforced without a complaint from an abuttor, apparently, I dunno. But here we have a hillside that's all runoff and no percolation. And it adds to that Urban Heat Sink thingy -- what's that called, again? -- and I can tell you that the air in Providence in August isn't getting any better year by year, as greenery is relentlessly removed. And for what? To keep the streets clear of cars for five magical hours out of each twenty-four. As my old swamp-yankee dad used to say, "That's a buncha hooey!"

Somebody said that the no-overnight-parking rule goes back to 1929. I can close my eyes and picture (in digitally-restored black and white) the deals going on in City Hall back then between paving contractors and the powers-that-were in the dawn of the Model T. But enough, already -- it's 2007, and there are hella good reasons why we should stop paving sideyards and backyards, and just do what everyone else does -- park on the streets.

With an army of contractors freed from their duties paving yards, maybe they could be hired to fix the doggone streets.

[Porch? Who knows? When the snow melts?]

[jencoleslaw]

Well said, Campster. There really isn't anything so unique about Providence that should preclude overnight street parking. And for 5 hours out of 24?!

[inProv]

it ain't unique but its true--providence continues to be made up of elected officials and staff who think they know better than anyone in the city or anyone in the country. That is what is keeping overnight on street permitted parking from happening in providence.

[runawayjim]

I'm sure that plays into it but I also sense that opposition from neighborhood groups is also to blame. The College Hill Neighborhood Association continues to oppose overnight parking on the grounds that it will add to further traffic congestion and more students bringing cars to campus. There are plenty of ways to guard against this but they seem unwilling to open this can of worms.

[Cotuit]

who fear that it will cause emergency vehicles to not be able to get to their house (even though they can during the day when the streets are filled with parked cars).