Welcome!
To those of you unfamiliar with my award-winning (OK, not yet exactly) solution to mapping street parking in my home town of Manhattan, I’ll just give a brief intro. I have been living and driving a car in NYC since the mid 80s and from the beginning I have been parking on the street. If you’re not from NY, you might find the idea that people actually park cars on the street hard to believe, but speaking for myself (and a few other hundred thousand New Yorkers who own cars), I could not have afforded the luxury of a car any other way. And, bottom line, I would not have survived in the center of this incredible human maze and its canyon sized walls and nonstop, motion-blurred excitement without the escape potential of a car right outside my apartment (OK, not right outside, but you get the picture). The instant freedom a car can give, whether it’s a day trip to the beach in Winter or loading up that perfect piece of furniture found on the street, were the wiggle room that enabled a lover of open spaces like myself to live here ever since.
So, I learned the tricks of parking on the street, the knack of Alternate Side of the Street Parking Rules, the pain and suffering of being towed (a New Yorker’s rite of passage), the conjuring almost perjurious defenses to combat an unfair ticket that otherwise could not be defeated, and life was good. But the one thing I could never find was a way to tell what the parking rules were in different parts of the city. There seemed to be no book, no map, no handy source for finding this out. And no matter how often I was in another neighborhood, I never seemed to be able remember what the rules were when I needed to go pick up that king-sized futon or show my half a dozen visiting cousins around. So, I created my own Parking Map and launched it on my web site parallelspaces.com and more of the origins of that invention can be found on that site.
I’m sorry. Did I promise a brief intro? Well, that’s the point of this Blog, isn’t it? When you get to sharing parking woes with other New Yorkers, the stories can take you well into the night and not without a few laughs, a lot of moans, and enough sheer disbelief to fuel a sitcom for a few seasons. And that’s why I am taking my parking information business seriously and starting this Blog: yes to entertain; yes to also occasionally educate fellow drivers with a few stories, a few of the tricks I have picked up along the way; and yes maybe even, if enough people are willing to spend some time here, to create a venue for reforming some of the parking absurdity we live with every day.
But my real reason for starting this Blog is I believe that beneath the minimum daily required search and hover tactics; buried within the decoded, mind boggling, parking rules; over and above the personal confrontations, tricks and angles and other passionate parking space disputes, and beyond the not personal (It's just business!) hauling away of your 2 tons of expensive synthetics and metal (and the paying to get it back); and, finally, even greater than the government, police, and profit interests that preside over us and our automobiles, there is a meaning to it all and to we who live this life it is as plain as the noses on our faces.
So, without overloading my web site (see plug above) with too much of my own parking trivia/mania, I aim to find it or to, at least, amuse a lot of people trying.
Now for a story...
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