Apartment Parking Rules And Regulations: Fill & Download for Free

Question: “Why do the French drive so many cheap or beat up cars?”I asked my French girlfriend that when we lived in Paris. The question was usually, “Why don’t you buy yourself a better and safer car?” She had three answers to that question. The first two made sense. The last one was…well shall we say it was “typically French”.Martine had two cars. The first was an older Citroen 2CV. I loved to drive this car. It seemed to be unbreakable. And the suspension with its massive wheel travel and carnival-ride body roll in turns, not to mention the truly odd gearshift lever, made the car fun to drive.But the car had NO crash survivability. So I worried about her getting hurt or killed in the 2CV. Moreover, like many Parisian cars, not only had it not been waxed and polished, it probably had not been washed since it had been assembled at the the Levallois-Perret factory! And none of the parking dents and scrapes the 2CV had accumulated over the years had ever been bumped out or repainted.The other car, which she kept at a stone farm house she owned in Brittany, was a truly wretched Fiat Panda.This car (which I swore had to have been assembled during one of the regularly scheduled Italian labor disputes and designed by a sweeper during an espresso break) had quality and assembly issues that would make a Yugo look good. Its ugly body work was not enhanced by a collection of body scrapes. And, like the 2CV, I doubt the Panda had ever been washed. Moreover, this car had a radio that had been so amateurishly installed and an electrical system that was so screwed up that the windshield wipers would operate and park themselves whenever you turned on the radio or attempted to use the cigarette lighter!Why did Martine keep these things?Reason 1). Well, first of all she was, as I mentioned, FRENCH. And the French, or at least Martine and her friends, can be cheap. The French can make a Scotsman seem profligate! Anytime I suggested that she buy a better car Martine would become almost hysterical telling me how much more she would have to pay for gasoline to fuel anything I considered to be a decent car. The French might spend most of their income on vacations or dining out, but they are really cheap whenever you mention operating costs or taxes.OK. She had a point there. French gasoline is expensive. Moreover (at least at that time), French automobile taxes and licensing fees and insurance premiums were based upon the size of a car’s engine. A bigger car would be much more expensive to own and operate. The cars I liked with big V8 engines would have been prohibitively expensive to drive in Paris.Reason 2). The 2CV had to be parked outside on Paris streets.And the French casually disregard parking rules and regulations, or anyone else’s car (!), as a cultural right. There is probably a verse about that in the Marseillaise.And the Fiat spent most of the time parked at the farmhouse or being driven on dirt rural roads.Her cars…both the street parked Parisian 2CV and the Brittany farmhouse Panda…were likely to accumulate bumps and scrapes. Martine would rather ignore and disregard the cars rather than worry about them. Nice cars parked outside like that tend to get damaged…especially in Paris.Reason 3). Ideology. Martine, despite her concern over her bank account and the excessive amounts she would pay for vacations, had a fetish about not appearing to be “bourgeois” or, mon dieu!, “like an American”! (OK, me. I was the only American Martine really knew.) Americans (according to Martine) were all philistines and liked and owned nice cars. Thus, to assert her French identity, it was culturally necessary for Martine to not like nice cars. Being French, a tribe that has turned ridicule into an arcane art form, Martine had a visceral need to criticize anything she perceived of as being “American”. (To get this right you have to pronounce the word with a disdainful accent while affecting a French sneer.) Thus, Martine not infrequently criticised me for being so bourgeois as to not only own fine cars but to actually take care of them!Thus, Martine’s third reason for owning tatty unwashed cars was the need to assert her French identity and her disdain for anything she characterized as bourgeois.Might be different now. But at the time it was a French thing.Note: Because it was so common for a French driver to bash already parked cars to enlarge a parking space for his vehicle or to bash the cars in front of and behind him to get out of a parking space, a lot of small cars in our Parisian Arrondisement, cars that were seldom if ever taken out of the city, were equipped with the sort of push bars or grill guards that are ordinarily only fitted to serious 4-wheel drive cars that are driven off-road.Note 2: This tatty car syndrome may have been a Parisian affectation. Martine’s father, who lived in an apartment in LeHavre, doted on and garaged (covered with a bed sheet!) his absolutely ancient Citroen 11 CV Traction Avant.

Well, there are some freedoms I don’t have just because I live in a major city and, if I don’t like the rules here, I can move. For example, I can’t have livestock, I can’t park my car in my yard, can’t have fireworks, and I can’t burn my leaves. If I lived about 30 miles west of here, I could do all of those things.I also can’t park on the street in front of my own house without a sticker on my windshield that says I paid $100 for the year to park on the streets which my tax dollars already paid for.Annoying rules and regulations at the local level are one thing, but, as long as we have the freedom to move around the country to a place without those regulations, I guess I shouldn’t complain too much.I’d like the freedom to tell the local government, which spends my tax money on schools, which school it should send my tax money to for educating my children. That’s called School Choice.Then there are some rules and regulations that will follow us no matter where we move around the country. They are inescapable. Some of them are good: no killing other people, for example. I say that because whenever someone mentions wanted to get some freedom back from the government, some leftist trolls always go with the strawman extreme argument.You don’t like regulations? I suppose you don’t like stoplights then, right? Just floor it through the intersection and hope for the best, right?Anyway, some conservatives would like the freedom to opt out of government programs like Social Security and Medicaid. You know, the “social contract” types of programs that we’re all forced into.Leftist trolls: I’d like to opt out of paying for the military, but I can’t.There. I said it for you. Save the digital ink.Some conservatives would like the freedom to work for sub-minimum wage, or to opt-out of benefits forced upon employers by the government, or to take a government job without joining the union. Most school districts around here have teachers’ unions and, even if you don’t join, you still have to pay their dues. But I think that “fair share” forced union dues was recently struck down.I’d like the freedom for myself and my family from being judged by our race, gender, or socio-economic status. Ironically, that’s something a lot of leftists claim to want as well… to be treated equally. Yet, there are some instances where it’s legal to give people like me less consideration for something because of our demographics or socio-economic status. This used to be called Affirmative Action, but I think they’re moving away from that term now.Some of us would also like the freedom to avoid taxes that exist to get people to act a way the government thinks they should act. Taxes on things like cigarettes, alcohol, or even gasoline, which exist because, theoretically, the government wants people to use less of these things.Some of the more libertarian-style righties would like the freedom to do things like pay a consenting adult for sex or smoke weed in the comfort of their own home.How oppressed do you feel for not being able to do them?Meh. Not oppressed enough to care at this point. The truth is that I don’t want to do a lot of the things the government won’t let me do anyway, but that doesn’t mean I think the people who do want to do them shouldn’t be able to.What bothers me the most is the taxes that pay for things I disagree with morally, or social programs I’d like to opt-out of. I feel more burdened than oppressed by these, though. I just got my paycheck stub today, actually. If, instead of taking my earnings from me for Social Security all of these years, I was able to spend my own money the way I wanted, I could have paid off my student loans by now AND had enough left over to convert my basement into an apartment for my mother… the only person I know who is on the receiving end of Social Security.Anyway, people are going to come at me with “social contract” stuff in the comments. Go for it. Tell me something I haven’t heard.

I am self employed, I work by appointment and I carry a lot of equipment on an industrial luggage cart. I parked my car in SoHo (lower Manhattan) took my equipment out and rolled it into the customer’s apartment building. About an hour later I returned and was blocked in by two Lincoln Town cars. Only one (the one parallel to mine) was really an issue as I could have maneuvered out if it wasn’t there. I considered going up on the sidewalk but the sidewalk was unusually high. The driver could have been anywhere since mostly only apartment buildings in the surrounded the area. In NY, there is alternate side of the street parking regulations. This means that cars cannot be parked on one side of the street, so that the street sweepers can do there job. So, people double park their cars on the opposite side of the street so that the street sweepers can pass. Even though this is against parking regulations, the ticket writers and police look the other way and do not usually ticket the cars that are double parked in these cases. It is common place for someone who is going to double park in this situation, to leave a phone number visible on their dashboard so that they can be contacted. So, I honked my horn off and on for about 30 mins but the driver never came to move his car. I waited about another 10 minutes, when I saw two female police officers driving down the street. I flagged them down and explained the situation. One of the officers informed me that she she can call to have the car towed, but that would take a really long time. She then told me that really the most she could do, is ticket the car since he was in violation of the parking rules. I asked that she ticket him/her. As she was writing the ticket, the owner of the second car that was slightly blocking me came and moved his car. So, I was now able to back out. After I got out, the officer was finished writing the ticket and she left it under his windshield wiper. I then pulled out a piece of paper and wrote the driver who blocked me in a note. The note said, “HA HA the next time you decide to block someone in, leave your phone number on the dashboard stupid. I hope that you enjoy your ticket. Sincerely, the person that you blocked in” I left that note under his windshield wiper next to the ticket. I got in my car, and drove off feeling like I struck a blow for all of us who have had this unthoughtful, selfish thing done to them. I just wish I could have been a fly on the wall when the driver arrived and found the ticket and my note.