The Baboon Congress

A Modest Request

31 Comments

Today’s post comes from Clyde of Mankato

A couple years ago I did a guest blog about parking issues near us. I can today report nothing has changed.

I am still parking a tiny Scion amidst the behemoths. Why are there so many monster trucks in this area? I call it Testosterone Town.

There are still 28 handicap parking spots in front of Scheels Sporting Goods and only two in front of Barnes and Noble.

It is still chaos in front of Target with the handicap parking right by the door at the busiest place where pedestrians stream right behind you, beside you, in front of you, and pretty soon over you. And my neck is worse making it harder for me to turn around to see.

Cub Food still has no cart corral near the handicap parking. The corral is still dead in the middle of the parking lot. I can report one change here. A few people without legal right think it is acceptable to sit in the vehicle, often a behemoth, with the motor running only half parked in the end handicap spot.

No one is listening to me.

Why don’t people just listen, you know?

31 thoughts on “A Modest Request”

    1. i love particularly that the bicycles are never the fancy multi derailer 18 speed mountain bike, racing bike big fat wheel model we see here. they are all utilitarian 3 speed with “regulr” handlebars and seats. no fancy paint or accessories. they all look like old shoes

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    2. But are there handicapped bicycle parking spots? I did not see any! We especially loved the cargo bikes and the “child care out for a ride seating six babies” bikes!

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  2. Unless or until you have navigated yourself or with someone who has need of a handicapped space, I don’t think a lot people recognize why you might need that wider space, that space closer to the store/restaurant/library. Traveling with wheelchair-bound friends in high school was a real eye-opener (I really hope by now they have improved the accessibility of large swaths of our nation’s capitol – the Washington Monument was especially appalling) – heck, even my supposedly accessible corporate campus leaves a bit to be desired (if you need to use a restroom and need help with a door, you may want to bring a buddy). Some days I just get cranky about things like behemoths parked in the wrong spot, some days I report them (if they don’t have a hang tag or plates)…and on at least one occasion I gave the offender an earful about idling in a handicapped spot (“Imagine your father has congestive heart failure or your mother needs a walker because she is weak from cancer treatments or your brother has been wheelchair bound since he was three – now think on helping them navigate into the store and through it…do you want them to either have to walk to the back of the parking lot or wait in the rain by the store’s door after being dropped off because some yahoo like you is using a handicapped spot they don’t need?…”). Oy. I’m with ya Clyde.

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  4. My mother had MS and an accessible van so I, too, am very aware of accessibility and lack thereof.
    Wasband put another nail in the coffin of our marriage when he used to joke, as we drove around a lot looking for a space, “I could pretend to have a limp”. Besides the fact that it wasn’t funny, it wasn’t funny.

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  5. handicapped parking is a great idea but badly implemented. if they cant do cameras for running red lights they certainly can do it for handicapped infringers. the pickups with idleing engines in the front spot at all stores is a pet peeve of mine. self important fuel hogs who care nothing about anything but their thought of the moment.
    barnes and noble is a sad semi surviving retailer. they dont have a clue about how to dircet behavior. scheels is great. i think the people parked in the handicapped spots should have people park right behind them and block them in. it is hard to understand bafoons and bafoon behavior. hillary is ahead of trump by 3 points in the latest poll. 3 points!!!! the world is surprising snt it. i never cease to be amazed at the total lack of thought and consideration for reasonable behavior. i make mistakes by being preoccupied with other things. i dont choose behavior that is offensive. some do. too bad. suburbans escalades hummers tahoes are everywhere. mid sze suvs are everywhere, mini vans are everywhere. the rest of the world drives a toyota carolla or a honda civic or a ford fusion. we drive a monster vehicle so we can carry a hockey team. sarah palins lipstick is everywhere.

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  6. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    Well, Clyde, you have my explicit permission to abandon your Cub shopping cart wherever you are–I am a neat an tidy cart parker. When the business can’t be bothered to place a corral near the handicapped parking spots where they are needed, the business loses my sympathy. And you have my heart.

    Following a February slip on the ice resulting in injury to a foot with plantar fasciitis, my right foot was encased in a boot for several weeks. In Big Box stores, I was sentenced to the handicapped cart which I thought might be fun; as it turned out, not really. People don’t see you in the cart unless it has the tall flag on it. I learned to slowly sneak into the aisle using the horn, so no one ran me down with a speeding cart.

    My point is, handicapped people are not seen. Handicapped parking is equally invisible and mostly not that “handi.”

    The positive of the thing is that at least we have something. My handicapped dad of the 1960-1970’s, was without any of it. As a 13 year old, I could negotiate a wheelchair up and down curbs and I could recruit burly men to carry dad up stairs. At least it is better than that!. Just not much better.

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    1. as the boomers all get old and decrepit i predict it will be fixed in time for the millennials to take advantage of it 3 ears later. plant a tree or a parking concept that you will not enjoy in your lifetime. it still makes the world a better place

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    2. The handicapped folks leave their carts by the blue spots. On windy days they blow around damage other cars.

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  7. Let me say that to write this, to get some topic up for today, I dug out this cartoon I used before, threw my tongue on my cheek, and threw some words up on my screen.
    We have a blue tag for Sandy’s lupus and arthritis, but she can easily walk from anywhere in the Cub parking lot. In the winter we use the spots by the door because cold is very hard on her, she feels it very strongly, a lupus thing.
    My attitude about all this is another example of the funny parade of human behavior. I did politely talk to the Cub manager, not for our benefit, but for others I see, that you have to have some way for the people in the blue spots to deal with the carts right there. He nodded politely.
    Our cub has blue spots that say they are reserved for pharmacy customers. There is a door right there where you can go in right by the pharmacy. But you cannot go back out that door (why is that?) so the net result is that it saves nothing in terms of steps taken as compared to parking b y the main entrance. I made a joke of this with the pharmacists. I had to draw a map to get them to see it. They of course tell me that handicapped people use the drive through, which is the real benefit.
    I think it is funny how people do not think things through.

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    1. I understand the average Joe may not be expected to see beyond his/her own nose, but you could hope that management…

      My mom was usually able, in Marshalltown at Walmart or Hyvee, to find a blue spot, and there was usually a cart waiting right there beside it. She would use the cart as her walker, and then she didn’t have to haul HER walker out of the back seat. Worked because she was in a small enough town where that spot was usually open.

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  8. I don’t have very much experience with the problems associated with using handicapped parking. From my experiences with other parking problems, I am sure what you are saying about handicapped parking is true, Clyde. We have trouble near our house associated with the people who park on our streets near the light rail station. They park almost in the cross walks making it hard to see traffic when entering the intersection.

    Another place where we have a problem is at the post office where they park in front of the mail box on the street while they go into the office to mail packages. The space in front of the mail box is a no parking zone. Often their vehicles sit in that no parking zone for a long time while they do their business in the office.

    There seems to a sort of code among certain people that they think gives them the right not be curteous when operating a vehicle. These might be people who are generally not courteous or they may be people who think being in a vehicle allows them to suspend the need to be courteous. You would think that because a vehicle can create a lot problems when not parked properly, everyone would make an effort to do this correctly. I don’t know what those people are thinking who believe it is okay to take advantage of other people when parking their vehicles.

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    1. There are places in Mankato where the buildings are so close to the intersection that you cannot see if cars are coming without pulling part way into the intersection. It seems to me that those should be four-way stops. With all the roundabouts coming in, the state has made it clear that they want traffic to flow as freely as possible so they have even removed some stop signs in places like that. They even admit that this increases fender-benders but they say they are exchanging a few minor accidents for free flowing traffic and fewer life-threatening accidents.
      And no one stops at and stays behind the crosswalks. We are making this town less a place for pedestrians and bikers when we should be doing the opposite. There are now shopping areas in this town that to walk to them you have to cross through constantly busing two lane roundabouts. A woman was simply run over in a crosswalk at a roundabout where she had the right to be. The driver could not grasp that rule. But in fact if the driver had stopped for her in the middle of the roundabout, he could have easily caused an accident.
      I think we do not so much need civil engineering as we need civility engineering.

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  9. Morning all. As a driver of a very low-to-the-ground vehicle, I LOVE the comic; even if we’ve seen it before, it’s fun to see again. I back out of parking spaces so slowly that I could probably get past a motion sensor, but I fear pulling out more quickly when I can’t see due to the monsters parked on either side of me.

    At our local Cub, you can get OUT the door close to the pharmacy parking spots but you can’t get IN, unless somebody else comes out, triggering the doors!

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  10. I wish this topic were funny for me, but as someone who truly needs handicapped parking it is just not. This morning I will shop for groceries. I often have to drive in circles for ten minutes in the parking lot by the store before a handicapped parking space opens up.

    I pulled into one of those spaces a few weeks ago, vaguely aware that someone was honking a horn. When I got out of the car I was accosted by an angry driver who had been waiting for that spot. I hadn’t seen him. I apologized and was about to pull out so he could park there. Then he said, “No, keep the spot. I can see you need it worse than me.” That did NOT make me feel better!

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  12. Great cartoon, Clyde — love it! I looked closely and could see it was the gargantuan Sherpa Intimida! Fun stuff, but yeah — not funny. A friend I do massage for has MS. In the 12 years I’ve known and worked on her, she went from walking with a cane, to now being mostly in a wheelchair. While I have not been out and about with her, she has definitely raised my awareness of the daily difficulties faced by the handicapped. From poorly designed bathroom stalls, parking lots and the beautiful old house she lives in.
    She loves to cook and totally redid her kitchen a couple years ago with the accessible shelves, lowered counter tops, plug-ins where she could reach them, etc. Unfortunately, she has difficulty with her hands, so she doesn’t do much cooking now, but it’s a beautiful and functional kitchen and she lives by herself with 6 cats. She’s also morbidly obese which adds another layer of difficulty to her MS.
    Clyde, I’m surprised you and Sandy don’t qualify for some sort of PCA or assistance around the house.

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    1. We have a 640 sq. ft. very convenient apartment with a laundry right off the main room. We are a very few steps from our car in the garage. I cannot only still manage the cleaning, it is good for me to do it. I need to move despite the pain. Sandy does some dusting, some laundry, some cooking. I have a big fear, right now, to be honest. I am having trouble with feeling in my right foot, the one on the gas pedal.. Clearly my back is disintegrating more. If I cannot drive we are so screwed. Right after we get through Sandy’s surgery and recovery and we get through my daughter’s surgery and recovery and we get through our son’s issues, I am going to have a full analysis done. My Dr. says name the day.

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      1. I know this is really hard to do, but it might be time to put yourself at the top of that list of people to take care of. When my friend’s feet became too numb to feel and handle the gas/brake pedals properly, she stopped driving. Shortly after, she took an early disability retirement from the job she loved as she could no longer keep up physically or mentally as a highly paid Business/Network Analyst IT-type position for the biggest county in Minnesota. Take care of yourself, Clyde, We all care about you.

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  13. Just made it to our London Hotel. I am glad we are all relatively able bodied to haul suitcases in and out of tube trains and then up several flights of stairs to get above ground.

    We had 48 narrow, twisty stairs to get us up to our 3rd floor room in Amsterdam. I named it the Stairmaster of Death. Our current hotel has a lift. Very little in the way of ramps and handicapped accessibility.

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  14. Thanks, Clyde, for providing a guest post – I like reviving some of these…

    I wish I could figure out why people don’t just listen, especially people responsible for management.

    was on a committee at Tapestry to make our place more accessible for people with any kind of disability – vision and hearing are the ones most frequently come across in a dance venue, but I am aware of someone who has done contra dancing in a wheel chair. (!) It’s amazing the number of things that can be done if people put their mind to it, and think ahead with the intention of making something inclusive for everyone. For instance, a dance teacher can wear a brightly colored bandana around one ankle to make it easier for a visually impaired person to see the steps.

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  15. Loosely related: Sandy wanted her favorite food, McDonalds, which I simply cannot face any more, so I people watched. Three sets of one parent with one child, children 3-4 years old. In two of them the parent was attentive to the child talking with the child, children calm and happy. Parents content to focus on child. Third was a woman who tailgated me for two blocks and into the parking lot. She was with a three (ca.) year boy, very busy and happy like little boys are. He wanted to play wit the toys that came with his meal. She spent the entire time texting. She would eat a fry, twirl her hair, nag the boy to eat and not play with the toys and repeat the cycle and repeat it. She kept threatening him along the way. After five minutes or so and she had eaten about a dozen fries and none of her burger, the boy started crawling under booths. She announced they had to leave. She threw away her food, complained to the boy about that, packed up the boy’s food and marched him out, which seemed fine with him, her fingers texting as she marched him out.

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  16. Yes, there are way too many underqualified people taking up handicapped parking spots. That’s annoying.
    Also those people who sit in parking lots with the engine running. Is your wrist too feeble to turn the ignition key to off? It drives up the price of gasoline for everyone when it’s wasted. Then there are those who are in an all-fired hurry to get to the next intersection even though the stop light is clearly red, and there are several cars already waiting at the light. That equals more gas used to achieve more waiting time at the light. Makes you wonder if having a brain is a requirement for getting a driver’s license.

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