No Parking for You
Reader BPM offers a tale of transportation woes:
I just moved to Hamden, Ct. outside New Haven. I take the MetroNorth train to Grand Central Station in NYC and walk to work. To get to the train, I drive. Usually I get dropped off, but sometimes I park in a garage. I’d rather ride a bike, but the roads aren’t the best for biking. Plan B is to get a scooter – a Vespa probably.
But! I learned today that it is not only illegal to park a scooter or motorcycle in one of the two garages immediately near Union Station in New Haven. It is also illegal to park them at a bike rack. Moreover, it is illegal to park at the edge of a sidewalk. The only legal option is to park at a 2 hour meter – not something very practical for people who use the station to commute, rather than, say, stop by for two hours.
Incredibly frustrating. One thing I will say is that though local government policies are often misguided, local government can also be incredibly responsive to busybodies. It probably wouldn’t take too many emails from New Haven-area scooter owners to local officials to get someone to change this and make some kind of provision for scooter owners to park somewhere by the station.
30 Responses to “No Parking for You”
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December 16th, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Speaking of bikes Matt you should be getting on the Metro to start building these:
http://www.dannychoo.com/adp/eng/1630/Japan+Bike+Storage.html
December 16th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
“You can turn three parking spaces into a dozen or more scooter spaces and charge each one the same for parking.”
Put that in the letter.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
He should be careful. If he annoys them enough, they will deal with the parking problem by banning scooters from the streets.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
There was a fun article in the Boston Globe over the summer about how gas prices were leading more people to commute via scooter/motorcycle and parking them on sidewalks. The conclusion was that this helped traffic, saved gas, had fewer emmissions and used less parking, followed by angry drivers bitching that it wasn’t fair that they could park for free. No concerns about safety, impedance or aesthetics (vespas and harleys brighten up a sidewalk, I say), just irritation about a pareto-improvement making them jealous
December 16th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Where is the famed lobbying muscle of Big Scooter?
December 16th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Reader BPM is clearly insane to be commuting from Hamden, CT to NYC … that’s about a 100-minute trip each way.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
I have the same problem in Chicago. I ride a motorcycle to work. I was doing it long before gas was $4 (or down to $2 now) as a means to conserve and, selfishly, cut costs. But you can’t park a motorcycle anywhere in downtown Chicago without paying. I settled for a garage space for $129, considerably lower than a car space costs, but ridiculously high nonetheless, considering my bike doesn’t take up any space that a car could use (the garage has bike parked amidst load-bearing posts too narrowly spaced for cars).
I’m too lazy to fight city hall. Plus, I don’t think it even could be successful. No one in these tough times is going to give up a penny of potential revenue.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Reader BPM is clearly insane to be commuting from Hamden, CT to NYC … that’s about a 100-minute trip each way.
Quite common to commute that far in CT. Which makes the fact that I-95 between New Haven and New York is one of the worst stretches of highway in the country even worse.
(hint: take 15.)
December 16th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
“Local government can also be incredibly responsive to busybodies”
You don´t know much about New Haven politics, do you? The Union Station garage is a massive clusterfuck, mainly because the state of Connecticut DOT is chock full of retards and won´t do a thing that involves helping a city. Suburbs or rural districts and roads, fine. Evil cities, not a dime.
Pathetic.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
As a former resident of New Haven, the idea that the local government would respond to citizen concerns to enact sensible provisions is wildly optimistic. (One example: the half-ass job they do plowing the streets in the winter.)
December 16th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
As someone who used to work for Mayor DeStefano of New Haven and spent a lot of time in the city, I can say that this is probably more of an oversight than an obtrusive city policy. Mayor DeStefano has worked for a lot of years to make the city more commuter friendly, and you’re likely to see as many people riding their bikes to work in New Haven as in Boston, the mayor among them. City officials in New Haven have worked hard to be as transit friendly as possibly – an oddity in a state where “public transportation” is an alien term.
Look at how the mayor spent his time in Denver this summer:
December 16th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Quite common to commute that far in CT.
I know … I live in New Haven. And I still think it’s crazy.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
“local government can also be incredibly responsive to busybodies.”
My mother was a real busybody. Everyone in the local government hated her. Unless she happened to be pushing their agenda at the time, of course. But over the years, she got on the wrong side of everyone. They really wanted her to go away, but they eventually would realize that my mom wouldn’t go away until they compromised with her. And by ‘compromise’ I mean that my mom got most of what she wanted, if not all. She didn’t earn many friends, but she got things done. Roger makes a good point about how the state screws over the cities, and Pennsylvania was no different. But when my mom faced that crap, she’d roadtrip to Harrisburg. And they wanted her to go away, too. My mom was hardly the best at what she did, there are many busybodies that are better. But busybodies like her are the truly unsung heroes of our culture. Many aren’t on our side, but that just means we need more on our side. I can’t do it, I don’t have the mentality. I’m too willing to compromise. I can’t do the impossible, but my mother did it regularly.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Weird coincidence. I just emailed my Baltimore council member last week, who is in the process of modernizing the City code, asking him to work on clarifying and liberalizing scooter parking regs. If you park a scooter at a 2 hour meter in Baltimore, it will be gone in 60 seconds. You need to be able to legally park a scoot on the sidewalk, chained to an inanimate object.
-j
December 16th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
One thing I will say is that though local government policies are often misguided…
I can’t even imagine a bad rationale for such a policy. What would possess any local authority to make parking for smaller, greener vehicles more difficult?
December 16th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Reader BPM is clearly insane to be commuting from Hamden, CT to NYC … that’s about a 100-minute trip each way.
I spent several months commuting from Waterbury, CT to Englewood Cliffs, NY … 100 miles each way.
December 16th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Matt might be interested to know that Cambridge, Mass. also has weird and specific scooter regulations that are onerous but also completely unenforceable, as Mass. does not require license plates on less that 50 cc (engine size) scooters (i.e. Vespa ET2), so unless the police stop you while parking your scooter, they can’t even write you a ticket.
December 16th, 2008 at 9:02 pm
i want to see how the mayor spent his time in denver this summer!
but the link is fail. :{
M
(denver vespa rider)
December 16th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
The question for Peter is not if he was insane doing such a conmute, but why the fuck you didn´t leave a shithole like Waterbury as fast as possible?
(My wife is from there. Christ, that town makes Detroit look orderly, clean and peaceful).
December 16th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
I live in New Haven too, and also hate that Union Station Garage!
I’d recommenced reader BPM and others interested should get in touch with the New Haven Safe Streets Coalition. They have done some successful work with the city’s Board of Aldermen recently, and could probably point in the right direction.
December 17th, 2008 at 1:55 am
“She didn’t earn many friends”
To put it bluntly, she was really good at making temporary friends and permanent enemies at the same time. If she were a man, she’d have died young with a bullet in her head. There are some advantages to being female.
December 17th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Thanks for the comments, fellow readers, and for the posting, Matt.
With regard to whether my commute is insane, it may be so, but less insane than real estate prices either in the city or in Fairfield County. Plus, I’m a professor, and I’m usually in my office three days a week, since I can grade papers, write lectures, and do most of my work remotely. If I was doing this five days a week for 50 weeks a year, I’d have my head examined.
(Actually, the ride is pretty pleasant. Many many people used to ride with me from Fairfield, so many that I rarely got a seat. This ride is about 28 minutes longer each way, and I can get a seat and easily read for an hour and a half. Nice!)
Haven’t been in town long enough to know what the NH government is like, although the head of the parking authority tells me that 100 bike and scooter spots will be installed at the station “within 6 months.” It was a good faith response to an email I sent, and I’ll take him at his word until June.
December 17th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
BPM if that is true it is very good news. I also live in New Haven. I don’t take the train nearly that often, fortunately not a commuter, but any time I do, getting to Union Station at all is crazily difficult. It’s not a safe walk into town. I would bicycle, but usually all the available racks are jammed up, and of course it’s illegal to chain a bike to any posts on the street. The bus schedule is ridiculous since they got rid of several of the direct lines. It’s insane that in a city this size, there isn’t more effort toward making the train station accessible.
December 17th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
BFR,
I would dispute the notion that it is not safe to walk from Union Station into town. That walk takes you past the central police station and through gentrifying 9th Square; I did it for years and never had an incident (and that’s when New Haven’s crime rate was higher than it is now). Granted, though, it isn’t a particularly pleasant stroll and I completely agree that the city could put more effort into making the station accessible.
December 17th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Scooters and motorcycles don’t pay for on-street parking in Toronto. Part of the reason is that we have pay-and-display, so ticket stubs tend to disappear quickly from the visor of motorcycle; but it is also the city’s recognition that this form of transportation is much better than cars.
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If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
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