Picture this. After a long hard winter, with piles of snow taking up valuable parking spots, spots the city did not care to clean up; you finally make it to spring and you immediately get slapped with street cleaning, construction closing off streets, outdoor seating and best of all…towing. These things affect us all, soon it will be feasts it will be continued street closures, does Boston care you can’t park? No. Even better, Boston pretends to have an alert system that is supposed to help you prevent your car from being towed if you somehow forgot one of the million schedules you need to keep track of. I woke up this morning to find that my alert system only alerts me when my car has already been towed, so I think it’s obvious my car has been towed.

Look everyone…I’m a rule follower as I’m sure you are too. I care about city guidelines, I care about parking somewhere that messes up someone’s life. But if a car can sit in a spot for several days without being towed and has a ticket, why do we need street cleaning and towing instead of just a ticket, on a little side street that residents had to search for an hour to find a parking spot on…on a TUESDAY when literally half the north end parking is taken up but construction and outdoor seating?

I suggest that we petition to stop street cleaning, or reduce the schedule to entire streets be bi-weekly not just one side, in the North end from April through end of September. Michelle Wu has already slapped the north end with fines to help with excessive outdoor seating which is something we enjoy, so why keep street cleaning at the level it has been? We could do this for the neighborhood, make a real change in our day to day lives, while entire parts of streets are closed off to resident parking, while construction continues to take our spots, while feasts are happening and while it’s so busy most of us spend over an hour to even find a spot. I suggest this so that we can actually live and park here without paying hundreds of dollars to a city that clearly has no desire for us to be living here anyway, and tries at every chance to screw us out of money AND time that we barely have because the city also makes things so unaffordable.