marco:
For street cleaning, every side of every block in most of Brooklyn becomes a no-parking zone for about two hours each week. (This is one of the reasons why having a car in Brooklyn sucks: you need to leave your parking spot and find a new one, which is nearly impossible, at least twice a week. Or pay $340/month for a garage, which doesn’t reduce the $250/month insurance.)
Park Slope uniformly performs this crazy maneuver during street cleaning: nearly every car double-parks against the other side of the street, forming a solid, perfect second row of cars.
Nobody gets ticketed. There’s some sort of understanding between the residents and the police that apparently exempts this double-parking from being a ticketed offense.
Street cleaning is usually done from 9:something to 10:something in the morning, after which everyone gets back into their double-parked cars and switches back to the freshly cleaned side of the street.
I’m curious how the system works:
- How did this start?
- Is there any formal organization of it?
- Are there rules? Do people get the same spot and just switch sides, or do they take whatever they can get? Is it a huge offense to drive up and park in the cleaned zone before the corresponding double-parked car has a chance to move back?
- Don’t most of these people have jobs? Who’s moving all of these cars back at 10:30 AM on a weekday?
- Can you hire someone to perform this shuffle every week while you’re at work for less than the cost of using a parking garage or getting a lot of parking tickets? If it’s a paid service, what happens if the driver can’t get your spot back?
Nobody told us these things when we moved here. They just gave us a refrigerator magnet about recycling.
Working in Park Slope I wonder the same thing. And thank the Lord I don’t have a car.
