In case you hadn’t heard: the DC area was socked with a boatload of snow over the weekend. We got 27 inches here in Bethesda, and many areas received comparable amounts (pay no attention to the official measure at National Airport which is mysteriously low at 18 inches).
The Washington Post reports on some of the etiquette questions that the snow has created. Being an economist, however, I would describe them as property rights questions. For example, what are your rights if you dig out a parking space?
Boston has codified its citizens’ right to benefit from their backbreaking snow-clearing labor; a city law says that if you dig out your car in a snow emergency, a lawn chair or trash can renders the spot yours for at least two days while you’re away at work. In Chicago, blocking a parking spot is illegal, but city officials acknowledge an informal rule of dibs if you’ve done the digging.
“I know this is public property, but if you spent hours laboring, I mean, come on, I think you have the right to say that is my spot,” said Tanya Barbour, who spent two hours Sunday shoveling free her silver Ford Expedition in the 1500 block of T Street NW. “If someone had clearly taken the time to shovel it out, I would not take that spot because I would not want that done to me.”
Across the District and in the Maryland suburbs Monday, many were not relying on Barbour’s honor system. Some used Boston-style markers — lawn chairs, recycling bins, orange cones, a mattress, even two bar stools with a Swiffer on top — to try to save spots along residential streets.
Keith Green, 37, said he’s heard too many scary stories to slip into a spot someone has blocked off. After the 1996 storm, a man was killed outside New York after a dispute over a shoveled parking spot. In Philadelphia in 2000, it happened again. In South Boston, a handful of assaults, slashed tires and other cases of vandalism end up in District Court each year after drivers are perceived to have broken the code.
In the District, said city transportation spokesman John Lisle, blocking spots is illegal. “We would hope people would work together and clear out several spaces instead of just one, but you can’t block a space,” he said.
In Chicago, Matt Smith, a spokesman for the Streets and Sanitation Department, said the lesson from a more snow-savvy city is that although “staking out a spot may save your space temporarily, it’s bound to create problems with your neighbors.”
My oddest Boston-snow-parking experience involved an on-street space near a friend’s house in Somerville. This particular spot never got shoveled, and all the others on the street were claimed with lawn chairs, so one night I decided to shovel it out myself. When we returned from a movie later that evening, I found that someone had thanked me for my work by filling the space back in. The people in the home abutting the space were the crabby, get-off-my-lawn sort of neighbors, and I guess they just really didn’t want anyone to park in front of their place.
shovel out several spots? where do they think we will put all that snow? you have to leave some unshoveled as a snow depository!
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