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We were not allowed to park on the street from 7 AM to noon last Friday so that the city could fix the roadway. Random white lines were painted all over the street several months ago to indicate sections that needed to be repaired. There were no actual potholes - just some cracks that, suitably nurtured and encouraged, could one day grow up to be Race Car swallowing crevices.
I took this set of pictures at about 8 AM, just after the last few cars were dutifully moved off the street. Parking on the street is always somewhat challenging - not quite up to, say, what you have in a typical San Francisco neighborhood, but more crowded than you should have to deal with while living in the suburbs.
Most of the problem is due to the houses along the right side of the picture - there are three duplexes, each with about eight vehicles, along with our neighbor and his yellow work trucks (you can see one to the left - our house is the one with the silver Camry's butt sticking out a bit).
The good news is that people do tend to at least vaguely try to respect the areas in front of other people's houses - while we have four vehicles, we are almost always able to park two in front of the house and two in the driveway. The duplex across the street uses their front lawn to hold their overflow, and most houses don't hesitate to block the sidewalk or park across their driveway. What also helps is that the end of the cul-de-sac (French for "bottom of the bag" - I'm not making that up) does not contain any houses, so there is open parking that can hold four vehicles as long as they all park diagonally (which is also illegal, but I don't think anyone has ever been ticketed for that).
In any case, it was interesting to see the street so wide open (not counting the basketball goal), if only for a few hours. A city van came by a little after 10 AM and picked up all the "No Parking" signs and the event was over with the roadway unimproved. Sadly this means we will have to go through this again later, although with the state's money woes, it might not be soon.
That's it - move along...
2 comments:
Hahahaha, I love this post. Our nabes have no respect for "our parking place", but that's the city for you.
The street looks fine to me, by the way, and I guess to the authorities too.
There's this guy who has a Ken Kesey-style beat up old yellow school bus with flowers painted all over it. It takes up at least three normal-car places. Every summer it ends up on someone's street for a week, or now two, now that they're only ticketing every other week. He always moves it right before ticket day, but nobody ever sees him. Ah, SF.
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