Every Thursday at 1:55 PM the south side of Leeward Ave. is packed with parked cars. Each and every car has a solitary person inside sitting in the driver's seat, staring straight ahead. Just one person, just sitting there. It's as if everyone's anticipating an atomic blast or an alien invasion and they're getting ready for a mass exodus. It's kind of creepy. It also has an army-of-aliens-posing-as-humans or Stepford Wives vibe. All these people sitting there, parked at the curb, staring straight ahead, one after the other. They, of course, are claiming their spots for when 2 PM rolls around and the street cleaning window ends.
I know this because lately I've had to learn how to cope with the miseries of street parking all over again. Having recently purchased a new vehicle while still being in possession of the old puts me in the position of having two automobiles. This is not a problem since my underground parking space (which I pay for) is fortuitously large and able to hold two vehicles in it comfortably, without causing any discomfort or inconvenience to anyone else. My building manager (a cowed but stubborn stooge) told me (in a rare act of goodwill) that I'm entitled to park one vehicle only and threatened to tow any others that may be sharing my generous space. So there.
So I've had to put my old car out on in the world and do the street cleaning shuffle twice weekly. The problem with this is that everyone else in a half-mile radius is doing the same thing and all spots are taken by 2:01 PM. Last Friday night I got home at 5 in the morning after an 18-hour workday, pulled my old car out of my garage, put my new car in, then drove around for almost 40 minutes looking for a spot to park. I ended up finding a spot about ten blocks away, then made the half-mile walk home and slept for about 12 hours. Then someone ripped off (literally) the tags on my license plate and put them on their own vehicle. Then I got a ticket for not having those tags. Then about five different vendors shoved fliers under my windshield wipers. Then pigeons shit all over my car.
Who would ever live in Los Angeles by choice? Even the nice areas are awful. I'll bet this bs never happens in the SLC.
4 comments:
The only reason SLC isn't like this is that it doesn't have a beach and a warm climate, and therefore it's not as popular a place to live. When I left L.A. to come to Utah (to college--then I got married and stayed. Long story.), I really missed L.A. I missed the beautiful parts--riding my bike down to Redondo Beach, for instance. Then, I later realized that I only missed it because I had never had to live there as an adult--i.e., I had never had to drive the freeways except by choice.
Sorry about the pigeons.
Why does a warm climate compel people to steal tags off of others' license plates?
Oh I don't know. I was relentlessly pursued by a parking cop once. You see my old car had no front license plate; it wasn't designed to hold a license plate. Utah law, of course, states that you must have a license plate. Parking Officer Cole made it his or her quest to make sure a scofflaw like me would shape up and put a plate on the front of my car. It started when I was parked near the University, and the kind officer found my address and started giving me tickets at my home too. I knew it was a useless battle when the kind officer tracked me down at a park miles from home.
The extremism of parking enforcement baffles me. I know my story of woe and intrigue is not the same as theft, but it is parking-related.
Okay, you probably got me on the theft. I was thinking more about the "on the street" aspect of parking.
My daughter and her husband lived in an apartment complex here in SLC that had the one-car-per-stall rule, similar deal.
Maybe the warm climate means bigger city, means more people, which more than any other factor (except for an elevated birth rate of males 18025 years ago--it's true, check it out!) correlates to more crime, hence license plate theft?
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