Parking: Where Some Quarters are Better Than Others.

I'd planned to cycle around to all the metro Park(ing) Day locations on Friday, but lunch and a few distractions intervened. Paul Schmelzer hit the same block I visited and shot the same locations, so I'll let him tell it.

His post attracted a revealing comment:

I suppose then the harried good people trying to find a parking space are allowed to go park on the green at Lake Harriet?

What a dose of pointless idiocy and youthful self-righteousness this is. And if looking at a bunch of self-absorbed, underemployed hipsters is to be seen as injecting wonder into the urban landscape, well, I think I’d be better off in Mumbai.

(Mumbai has about 500,000 cars, with common parking for about 8,000. The city has almost twice the average vehicular density.)

Where Mr. Anonymous detects self-righteousness and self-absorption, I found a friendly invitation to sit and talk with strangers — not what would anyone expect to encounter at a street parking space, in a ramp, or glaring through the tinted power window of an Escalade.

The "wonder" being injected was not that urban spaces could use more greenery and hipsters — or even to show how easily a small piece of asphalt could be transformed to a community space. It was to make us question why we tolerate the barren monoclines created because of our autodependence. 

Mr. Anonymous saw those paved spaces as the exclusive domain of harried good people in cars, which of course is the prevailing view of these public spaces. Pedestrians and cyclists should stay off the streets and keep their quarters in their pockets.

Had he looked, Mr. Anonymous would have found more parking in the Monte Carlo lot right next to the temporary parks, and he would have seen more self-righteousness and self-absorption in his mirror.