Life in the big city of Darby. Sigh.
That’s the price you pay for having the government provide you with a place to park your car.
What would you do? You shovel out your car from 1 foot of snow. Your neighbor doesn’t. You leave and when you come back your neighbor pulled into your shoveled spot in front of your house and his previous spot still has a foot of snow on it .Just curious !!
Smells like Liberalism — you do the back-breaking work of shoveling out this spot, and then some stranger can come along and use it. If you complain about that, the government will punish you.
A long-time Chicago tradition, so much so that it has it’s own monicker: “dibs”.
“Dibs” are often marked with worn-out dinette chairs. Violate dibs and you’re asking for trouble - like the kind involving physical violence.
I see this a lot in my town, but since I have a garage I’m “above the fray” :-)
After one humongous snow storm, I shoveled the entire walkway in front own to the parking lot then I spent another hour shoveling out my car. The snow was deep! Needless to say, nobody else was out there with their own shovels.
Anyway, I had to go out someplace that evening and when I returned somebody had parked in my spot.
Well, I then had to go shovel out another spot for my car then when I was done, I went back to the other car and replaced all the snow that I had previously removed and maybe twice as much more just for principle.......
On behalf of the theory of property rights generally accepted by the American Founders—that expounded by Locke—I want to defend the practice of “dibs” on shoveled parking spots and object to Darby’s ordinance.
The public streets are indeed public, common in terms of Lockean property theory, and under ordinary circumstances remain so. Following a blizzard, however, the distinction between a shoveled parking spot and one filled with snow becomes meaningful. So long as that distinction is meaningful, the person or family that put labor into the creation of a shoveled parking spot, thereby adding value to the common property, has a claim on the added value. Unlike homesteading, the claim is not permanent, but only makes sense while the added value persists: until the snow melts for the street is adequately cleared.
Darby’s ordinance is typical statist “liberalism” writ small—punish the producers of shoveled parking spaces.
I avoid such problems by living in the state of my ancestors...the lovely state of North Carolina!
Don’t bother coming, though. I saw the census figures, and we’re full up here. :P
Move the marker, take the spot, then file an insurance claim for the damage to your vehicle.
It is not only a tradition in parts of Philadelphia but in much of the Northeast and particularly in neighborhoods with houses that do not have garages.
While it is true that local streets belong to “the public”, not individuals, it is a civil thing to consider who are they - the local streets - really built for with that “public money” and whose “public” money was it.
Local roads in residential neighborhoods were built for the residents living there, for people visiting them and for delivering public and private services to them. And, THEIR property taxes, predominately, paid for their portion of the revenue to build and maintain those roads.
And, while none of those residents has a LEGAL right to the space in front of their house, civil respect between neighbors suggests a social obligation to not covet the space in front of your neighbor just to please your self and at their expense.
And yes, when your neighbor clears the snow from the space around their car, parked at the curb in front of their house, so that that space is cleared for parking, then yes, you, their neighbor, have a SOCIAL obligation to NOT make your life easier and save yourself some work by parking there, at the expense of their efforts to clear the space.
Really good neighbors are not offended during snow season by chairs or other objects marking spaces their fellow neighbors have cleared. It is not a matter of law. It is a matter of civil and social respect for each other. Most of the neighbors where this tradition takes place understand that.
People making laws against the practice are stupid and reckless. The law should not be used for such issues.
As for the chairs and other objects and the work of the snow plows; they are not blocking any space that would not be blocked anyway if a car was parked there. They are no more a “hazard” than the parked cars themselves.
My neighbors and I would defend this tradition, up and down our street, against any move to “outlaw” it; as I believe most of the residents of our New Jersey town would.