Parking Story

I had to take to my blog to tell this story to capture the largest audience at once - because it was too good to pass up.

I live in Chicago and as in most metropolitan regions, parking is hard to come by, especially in dense residential areas. My neighborhood is no exception - in fact, to park on my street it is required that your car windshield display the proper city-issued parking sticker with our zone number emblazoned on it (a rule that is too often broken). Also, some of the other streets around us require a similar parking sticker, but of a different zone. As such, we can't park in their zone, they can't park in ours (again, an oft-broken rule).

Luckily, we live right off of a major thoroughfare called Cicero Avenue. It's a 4-lane road with traffic in both directions and runs the length of the entire City. We have free one-hour (rarely enforced, if ever) parking on Cicero right off our street (we are less than a block in from it). If we can't find a spot in our zone, we can park on Cicero. It should be noted that we also have a few lengths of curb around the other corner on Lamon St that offers permit-free parking and is a closer walk to our front door, so we take advantage of that as much as possible. Getting to the point of the story, sometimes it snows here in Chicago and sometimes it gets pretty deep. Since Cicero Ave is a major snow route (meaning its one of the first to get cleared) there is a sticky little rule that you cannot park on it when the snow is greater than 2" - this is so the plows can effectively clean the street for its intended multi-lane use. You can see where this starts to create a "pile-up" problem - where to go with all the cars! Cicero really takes a lot of the parking pressure off of the residential streets, so when you are not allowed to park there it is that much more difficult on all of our streets - plus people park like jackasses and aren't always bumper-to-bumper, so you lose a few spots to inefficiency as well.

So, it's a well-known trick in Chicago winter legend that when you have to leave your home in your car and the forecast is anticipating snow, that in your car's place when you leave you will place an object to "hold" your spot so you can park there when you return. This custom seems to be popular and well respected. I haven't had the opportunity, but given it I think I would get out and move this object if I saw it in my parking zone, and park in its place anyway. Parking sucks around our place and I don't know how, but Kristen and I have been fortunate enough not to have to resort to putting out a plastic chair to ensure a spot. By the way, the object of choice is a chair - any kind of chair. I have also seen traffic cones with a broom handle sticking out of them so you can see it should the snow get higher than a traffic cone... idiots.

Anyway, so as I mentioned the chair is customary. This morning as I was walking Jake I saw a rather unusual object in a parking space and thought it an effective, yet cumbersome item to hold the spot. Get ready for this... it was a foosball table. HAHA! Someone dragged out a foosball table just to try to get a spot in front of their house! I was blown away by this. What a pain in the ass it must have been to drag that foosball table out of the house, down the front porch steps and into the street (in the snow!), just to save a goddamn parking space!

Additionally, my zone is by far the smallest and hardest to find a spot, and Kristen and I each get one quite often, so I know these people don't have THAT hard of a time finding a spot in their miles of zone curb. Also, we have a few condo buildings on our street whereas most of the other zones are single-family homes - some even with private garages - so less cars to populate the streets. I just found it absurd that one would need to save a space with a gigantic foosball table. And I thought I'd share the story with all of you.

I hope you enjoyed it and mostly I hope it made sense - it's kind of a hard concept to grasp.