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Politics and Parking

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Now that the Minnesota State Fair is nearing its end (already!), the lawns of Falcon Heights are feeling the effects. Terribly hot, extremely dry weather will do that to a patch of grass. So will a steady stream of traffic rolling over what used to be a lush, green expanse.

The Minnesota State Capitol, seen across the lawn

Even as I use the “lush” “green” and “expanse”, I know they are misplaced. Nobody within 2 miles of the fairgrounds cares a whit what their front yard looks like. All that matters is how many F-250 pickups will fit between the hedge and the trees.

And so it will go for the Minnesota State Capitol’s lawn for the next few years, as it becomes a State Fair of sorts for construction crews doing renovation work on Cass Gilbert’s beautiful but needy building..

This is dangerous. Politics is blood sport, they say. But parking issues can turn minor conflicts thermo-nuclear. I saw a guy get fired once because he wouldn’t move his car out of a reserved spot.

The plan at the State Capitol is to put asphalt over the grass for the next four years while renovation work is underway. I’ve seen old pictures of the statehouse from a time when it was surrounded by less-than-adequate housing. The park-like surroundings of today are more pleasant-looking, but every piece of land deserves the chance to serve, at least one time, as a prime example of the best and highest use of real estate – a parking lot.

Work on the building will be extensive and the disruption significant as the capitol is shored up, spruced up and totally filled up with construction workers and their equipment. But the real test will come in 2017, when the work is done and the lawn is restdored – and all those powerful people will be told they are going to lose their convenient front-of-building parking.

Think what might happen when all that dust meets all that paper and political ambition!

When has a parking problem made you angry?

44 thoughts on “Politics and Parking”

  1. Da big U,1965! Jah,dot year, big river was aflood, Rumor hit to get cars off of flats. U an city police wrote dousands of tickets for where students an da workers parked dose cars an f250s. Such human decency.

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  2. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Oh, parking. M-o-o-o-a-a-a-a-n-n-n-n. My son is committed to living without a car. Sometimes I understand why, especially after his stint living Uptown WITH car. He and I bonded while waiting in line at the impound lot on several occassions. That place is a downer.

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    1. yes it is. i laughed with my son about the people behind the glass. i asked what could be a more uningratiating job that sticking it in peoples ear for 237 dollars and having them wait in line for an hour before getting that privilage.

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  3. Good morning. I am always a little angry when some one manages to slip into a parking space that I have been waiting to use. I can’t remember the last time this happen. It hasn’t happened recently , but it has happen a number of times in the past. I think the people who did this could tell I had been waiting for the spot and managed to get just the right angle to get into the spot ahead of me as the person that was in the spot pulled out. These people usually get a dirty look from me and they usually act as thought I don’t have any reason to give them that look. No doubt, they knew what they did.

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  5. parking is interesting here, it is a religion in other places, chicago new york san fransisco all seem a little short on parking spaces. when you need to park in one of these crazy areas the art of knowing the ropes is vital. cabs are in business because of parking issues in these places. cabbing it is a way of life. you park your car. take the train in and cab it form the train station. or try to find parking ha ha ha

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  6. i have no good parking stories. yeah my car has been gone when i got back a couple of times. i came out of a timberwolves game to where i had parked my car shortly after the bicycle lanes had been launcehd. i hadnt thought about it at all because the whole blok was parked against the curb. when i came out the whole block had been towed to the impound lot. expensive ticket to a wolves game. i wondered why all those people were looking at me ot the window of the bar as i parked my car. they all knew i was going to get whacked and just let it go.

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  7. The issue of parking is currently making me quite angry. Specifically in North Carolina where the new voter suppression laws have removed on-campus voting in the largest campus in the state. For the 9500 students to vote going ahead, they have to take two separate buses to a far away polling site which has only 15 parking places available! Funny how the fact that 60% of them voted for Obama is reaping this consequence!

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  8. It drives me nuts when drivers of those big ugly gas guzzlers take a parking space and a half. A half a parking space isn’t useful to anybody.

    I got towed once, from the east bank at the U of M – as in tim’s Timberwolves story, I parked on a block that had one space open in a line of cars. Didn’t see the sign that said No Parking 4-6PM. Came back and the whole block was empty.

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  9. When I lived in Stevens I got towed twice in one snowfall, because I didn’t understand the parking rules. I learned fast. At the duplex we’re living at now, we’re on the odd side of the street, so I don’t have to move my car until the last day of the snow emergency, by which time the streets are usually pretty clear and I can get out fairly easily.

    Getting towed was annoying and expensive, but not enraging. The parking issue that really teed me off was when I got ticketed at Riverplace last winter for being just a few minutes too late back to the car. If I’d had one more quarter it wouldn’t have happened (I’ve filled up with quarters since, believe me!). Mainly these things are my own fault–not putting enough in the meter, not noticing signs, not keeping track of time–so I get more angry than if it had been someone else’s doing.

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  11. Last time I got towed was a “Snowbird” situation (that’s what my ticket said) like CG, where I didn’t yet understand the Snow Emergency rules. That made me mad.

    We live where our side of the street is Robbinsdale, other side is Crystal (in one of those strangely shaped aberrations, the panhandle), which have different parking rules – you learn not to park overnight on the Crystal side. There are also signs that say “Permit Parking Only” – I think since some of Robbinsdale is right by North Memorial Hospital, people nearby started getting these on their street, and it spread to ours. We’ve only once had a guest get a ticket, and it was totally inexplicable why that one time they chose to ticket. Not overnight, either (for which we have a special tag to put in the car)… It was contested and “forgiven”, but I was mad at them for that.

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  12. At one time when he did have a job, my wasband cleaned & fixed money-handling machines in banks. He always had to run bags of coin through them to make sure they were operating correctly. One day, his car was impounded for illegal parking. He went to bail it out with four bags of coins and just dumped them onto the counter. I thought that this was as good a way as any to register his annoyance at the impound lot.

    I’m glad this has never happened to me because I’d likely call 911 since I’d be stranded and have no idea what to do!

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  13. Except for the normal, “hey, I was going to park there” moments, I don’t know that I let parking rile me too much. I did, on one occasion, leave a nasty note on a car windshield when the giant car next to me had parked so close that I had to go in from my passenger side and climb over to get out – and at that, I could barely maneuver out of the spot it was so tight (I’d say I had less than 3 inches of clearance). That in and of itself was bad, but Miss S was quite young at the time, so I was trying to do this while also wrangling a child (and doing my best not to introduce her to “new language” that she didn’t need to learn yet). Oooh was I mad. It’s happened once or twice here at work, too – once I was just about to start swearing and figuring out how the gymnastics of traversing my stick shift in a pencil skirt was going to work when the offending driver came out – I showed him the problem and he sort of apologized and explained that he had been late. I get “late,” but really – if you can’t take the extra minute or two to park your car well and notice that the person next to you is going to need a bottle opener to get into their car, you need to re-prioritize your schedule and life a bit.

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  14. In the first ten years of my marriage, we had no garage, so we parked on the street. In the next twenty years, we had a garage that my erstwife claimed for herself, so I parked on the street. I have many nasty memories of trying to get the car moved before snowplows and cops with ticket pads came along to tag me. The winters of the 70s were truly vicious. A snowstorm would drop a heavy load of snow and then the storm would be followed by arctic air. So you had to shovel out and start your car when it was 20 or 30 below. Fun, fun, fun! And when I parked in front of my home the street had such a curved crown shape that the car would spin wheels, then slide downhill to rest against the curb. Then the only way out was to find five stout Minnesota men to push it.

    Working for the legislature involved parking issues. You can map a person’s status at the legislature with precision by how nice their parking spot is. As a new and temporary employee, I was consigned to the lowest circle of hell, a spot known as “Lot X.” Lot X was a long hike from my office.

    The erstwife left for Belgium, so I now have the garage. Love it! I really love it!

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  15. Like Anna, I don’t typically let parking situations enrage me. That said, it’s a very satisfying feeling to have a parking ticket dismissed. I’ve done it three times.

    Once was a ticket I got during a snow emergency. I had been to some gathering or another and returned home at around midnight; the street had already been plowed curb to curb, so I parked in my usual spot in front of our house. Sometime during the night I was issued a ticket for having parked on a snow emergency route during a snow emergency. The following day I spent 30 minutes waiting in line at City Hall to protest my ticket. Since the snow emergency rules in St. Paul are that you can’t park on a snow emergency route until the street has been plowed curb to curb, there wasn’t much they could do, so the ticket was dismissed.

    On another occasion, I was ticketed while shopping at the St. Paul Farmers’ Market. The parking meters in the vicinity are not enforced from 7 AM to noon on Saturdays, it says so right on them. However, there are also separate signs that say that parking isn’t allowed between the hours of 2 and 6 AM. That leaves a 1 hour window of opportunity, between 6 and 7 AM, for the parking enforcement to swoop in and ticket the scofflaws that shop at the market when it opens at 6 AM. On that occasion, I wrote a letter to Dave Thune, the City Council man for the area and the area where I live. Dave made a call to whatever department handles signage and asked them to change the signs. I still needed to go to City Hall to have my ticket dismissed, but my complaint had already been forwarded to them by Thune, so I didn’t even need to plead my case to have that happen. The Farmers’ Market management had received numerous complaints about this very issue, and had for years been trying to get the signage changed with no luck. All it took to remedy the situation was a complaint to the right person, someone who understood that the signage was i conflict with the City’s desire to encourage support of the downtown
    Farmers’ Market.

    On another occasion I received a ticket while my car was parked in front of our house because some parking enforcement person responding to a complaint about a car that had been abandoned on our street. While writing up the abandoned car, he or she had noticed that I didn’t have a current tab on my rear license plate and gave me a ticket. Someone had stolen the sticker, but had left the one on the front end of my car, so it was obvious that I did have current tabs. Of course, I promptly applied for replacement tabs, but I decided to protest the ticket anyway. That ticket, too, was forgiven, and I don’t think it should have been written in the first place. Are these folks paid a commission on how many tickets they write? Some of them make no sense at all. I have no quibble with paying tickets if I have let a meter run out, or am otherwise in violation of some parking restriction, but sometimes they really make you scratch your head. Thankfully, I have never had my car towed; that would be pretty upsetting.

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    1. Yes PJ, the Saint Paul parking enforcement folks are on commission; that’s exactly why they’re so “on the ball.” Every ticket is money in their pocket! Not sure if it gets pulled out of their pocket if the ticket is forgiven.

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      1. thats got to be in the public domain. wouldnt it be interesting to publish how many dollars of taxpayers salry go toward paying the officers salary in order to allow the commission to be earned ie officer john smith issued 200 tickets that each take 20 minutes to write= 77 hours at 100 dollars an hour for a cop when salary and benifits are figured in= 7700 dollars paid by taxpayers to give john 200 tickets paying 20 dollars each equals 4000 dollars. nothing judgemnetal just a statement that in st paule where there are numerous things for an officer to choose from john smith charges 11,700 per year to the taxpayers to pad his pockets. doesnt have to be judgemental just a fact based spreadsheet published in the local paper as a public service

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  16. Two infuriating ones last year:
    Got ticketed for parking too close to an intersection, which I can understand. But since they were writing that one up, they also added a ‘license tabs obsructed’ violation as well. The tabs were obstructed by a license plate bracket that said, “Hang Up and Drive.” So, I was ticketed for trying to get people to hang up their cell phones.
    Also got a parking ticket for parking in a “double duty” zone where there was a ‘Bus Loading’ sign with stipulated times and metered parking spaces. I parked at one of the metered spots and -while I was paying/getting a receipt,- the parking guy ticketed me. I ran back to try to talk with him but he stomped away saying, “Tell it to the city.” …charming…

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  17. when my dad was a young man in fargo the winters and the parking meters allowed for a little ingenuity when it was cold enough if you spit on your nickle before you put it in the meter it moved the needle up to 20 minutes and froze it there.i think you can do it today but the tick tick part of the meter is not connected to the frozen hole anymore.

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    1. When I feel low,
      cuz there’s no space,
      I look and look,
      just missed that space,
      All I have to do,
      is screa—-m , scream scream scream.
      All I have to do is scream

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    1. What do they call that– ‘First World Problems’?
      But fun. Thanks tim.

      Thanks for being there all, Y’all. 🙂
      Always a pleasure catching up at the end of the day.

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