Posts Tagged “parking”

Not sure of the status of the cars in there, but they’re not letting anybody else in.

Change is the only constant, and soon I’ll be spending a lot less time in Davis Square.  It’s truly the Paris of Somerville and I’ll miss it – except for these things:

Chuggers: Maybe one day I’ll have a minute for their cause (by which they mean a dollar, or several) but until then I will continue to avoid these earnest yet shadowy CHarity mUGGERS who are a plague upon Davis Square.  At least the clean-cut gents promoting the LDS wear nametags, and we know who they represent.  I gave at the office, thanks.

Crappy pizza: Sure, this is a problem in many places, but the drought of quality pizza in Davis is just despressing.  There’s lots of great places to have lunch around here but sometimes you just want a slice.  Is thin crust without orange oil too much to ask?  Do we have to order in from Medford?

Precision parking enforcement: I don’t have much sympathy for people who park illegally or for those who try to drive in dense urban areas, but the Somerville parking enforcement around Davis is deadly accurate to the minute of meter expiration, and frankly, it bums me out.

Diesel booth squatters: I don’t remember ever wanting to study as long and hard as these people do, no matter how caffeinated I was.  What’s the deal with spreading your stuff out to soak up an entire four-top all day long?  Don’t you ever have to go to the bathroom?  Aren’t you worried about bedsores?

The horrifying stench off Grove Street near Elm: I don’t know what it is or where it comes from, but it’s bad.  Real bad.  I think it’s actually the smell of death.  And as summer advances, it’s not getting better.  If that’s coming from one of those restaurants, somebody needs to look into it, stat.  Maybe the guys playing soccer in bloody aprons in the parking lot know something about it, but I’m not going to get close enough to ask them.

Sometimes I get excited about small things.  Some would say that’s the point of this blog.  Others would say, “that’s what she said.”  Today’s little fixation is the Random Redirect Wordpress Plugin by Matt Mullenweg. I have implemented it near the top of the sidebar with a version of Det. Harry Callahan’s famous inquiry.  So give it a spin.  You gots to know, don’t you?

That’s a pretty thin post, even for me, so here are a couple of other random items.

World Run Day

Today is World Run Day, a global virtual event in which people so inclined run as far and as fast as they fell like, and some even raise money for charity doing it.  Some Boston-area folks are taking a 3.8-mile loop around the Charles River Basin today. I’m more likely to walk it, but I was pretty excited to learn about MapMyRun, an ad-ridden but still cool map mashup that lets you plot your route and share it with friends while compiling statistics on the route and your progress along it.  The elevation feature is exceptionally cool and (so I hear) useful for those in marathon training. Kudos also to the Librarian on the Run for having a cool blog and for starting her fundraising for Mass Eye & Ear for the 2009 Boston Marathon.

Things to Worry About

I discovered Jeff Cutler’s blog of things he claims we worry about via a random twitter encounter.  I have to suspect these might actually be Jeff’s own fears, but I can’t say they don’t often resonate.  It’s a bit like those Worst Case Scenarios books, but without any actual solutions or preventions for the disastrous scenarios.  For example:

Slotter Slaughter
That when you go play the slot machines in either Vegas, CT or RI, the new slot where you feed in money will grab your tie or handkerchief and strangle you unceremoniously. Which also leads me to wonder why anyone would have a ceremony for a strangling or any such event.

My general diagnosis is that Jeff should switch to wearing bowties.

Park and Pray

I noticed Park and Pray’s inaugural post, The Five City Parkers you Meet in Hell, via Universal Hub.  To my pleasant surprise, they have kept it up with a nice mix of parking news.  too bad they weren’t around when I did unsuccessful battle with lousy parking maps and poor signage at the Cambridge-Somerville neutral zone.  They describe Park and Pray thusly:

Chronicling the adventures of urban street parking, Park and Pray started in the unparkable jungle of cow path built spaghetti-grids that make up the Boston neighborhoods. A voicebox for the adventurous spot-hunter, we’ll report on just about anything with a cursory relationship to car ownership in the city.

They welcome tips – the informational kind – so check them out and share your parking stories.

Bead Babe Roz

As I’ve mentioned, I have a theoretical affection for Etsy, but haven’t yet been a customer.  Recently, I helped L photograph some jewelery for her mom’s Etsy site, which is now up and running.  So if you’re interested in some beady goodness for yourself or for a gift, head on over to Bead Babe Roz before she’s sold out for the holidays.

With apologies to Ed Ruscha…

Look really closely at the top sign. See the bolt at the M of “EACH MONTH”? It says “SOMERVILLE” under there just inside the red margin. Ditto the no bikes sign – below the black border, SOMERVILLE.

Hmm. This sign is close to where I parked. It might say SOMERVILLE on the top sign like the one previous, but it’s covered up by the lower sign, which has no city designation.

A split decision here. The street cleaning sign does say SOMERVILLE in small letters, but the permit parking sign says nothing.

This pair has no city on it. Are we in Cambridge yet? Probably not, since the street cleaning days match the Somerville signs.

This is definitely the largest type size for the word SOMERVILLE so far.

Aha! Pretty clear lettering by Cambridge, plus a different street cleaning zone.

More Cambridge.

CITY OF CAMBRIDGE. Can’t miss that.

Ditto.

In sight of Mass Ave, if you weren’t sure yet, you should be now.

The tally: Five signs in Somerville, about half of them saying Somerville, and six signs in Cambridge, all unambiguous. A pretty poor showing by Somerville since only about 1/4 to 1/3 of the length of the street is Cambridge.  The facts aren’t in doubt, but it took some squinting to find them.

I while ago I heard a rumor that there was a border dispute between Cambridge and Somerville. I wasn’t able to get any confirmation, so I put it out of my mind. But now it appears that I might have fallen right into it. I know what you’re thinking. This is just the sort of thing that could happen only to me. Perhaps.

As you may know, I live in Central Square, Cambridge, and work in Davis Square, Somerville. My car is registered and permitted to park in Cambridge. I don’t normally drive to work, but sometimes if I have to drive somewhere after work, it makes sense to drive there and then hop in my car directly after work. So I decided to try and optimize things by finding the point in Cambridge closest to my office in Somerville, and parking there free. It was surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative map of the border, but I eventually dug up this street cleaning zone map on the Cambridge DPW web site.  For what it’s worth, the Somerville web site had zero helpful information.

Based on this, I decided that parking on the East side of Russell street near the corner of Elm would be the optimal location, just inside the Cambridge line, but about as close to Davis square as possible. In the past, I had parked lower down Russell street where both sides are clearly Cambridge. Today I got a spot in front of 44 Russell street, a couple of houses from the corner.

Officer Soares saw it differently.

For $20 I might have sucked it up, but for $40, I decided to stand by my city’s DPW map and look into this. I visited the Cambridge police station near my home and consulted the large map on the wall. It seemed to match the street sweeping map. An officer asked me what I was doing, and I explained the situation. He picked up a phone, called some number and asked, “44 Russell street, is that us or Somerville?” and told me that it was in fact a Cambridge address. He did note that it was possible that the city line existed between the house and the curb, but could not confirm one way or the other. One could argue that the DPW map above shows that, but I assumed it was sloppy illustration.  That’s what happens when you assume, but it still sounds like reasonable doubt to me.

The back of the ticket states, “This violation may also be appealed and adjudicated by mail if supporting documentation is mailed within 21 days of issuance.” I got home and began to assemble my case. I checked a source perhaps even more respected than the police. I searched “44 Russell Street, Cambridge, MA” and got a nice map. Just to make sure, I then tried “44 Russell Street, Somerville, MA” and look what I got:

Very interesting. I think I can say with certainty that #44 is in Cambridge. Now I have to go back to the scene and double check the signs to see if there are any clues to the ownership of the street itself. So far, I haven’t been able to see any “permit parking only” signs that say Cambridge or Somerville on them.

No doubt, this story is to be continued…