Otherwise known as the most terrible time of the year. As if it wasn’t already a total cluster-f to try and park in this city (particularly in the Back Bay and South/North Ends), street cleaning ads in a whole new dimension of pain.
“Oh, there is a total supply/demand issue with just regular resident parking on normal days? Great, why don’t we clean every street in the neighborhood at the same time and same day, cutting available parking in half. That should make it easy for everyone.”
FAIL.
Fail for residents that is. The city cleans up (pun intended) on this little operation. And half the time they just seem to write the tickets and never even clean the streets. I remember when I lived in Brighton, they’d tow the cars, and then never clean the street. Or clean the wrong street on the wrong day. What a joke.
In fact, the street cleaning started on April 5th, and my block of Commonwealth Ave was on the no-park list. Looks like tickets were handed out, but the streets still look as dirty as ever.
I actually started making myself a Google Calendar to keep track of the cleaning schedule in my neighborhood, and then thought it might be useful for others as well, so I made it public. Right now the calendar only covers “Back Bay Proper” from Mass Ave to Arlington Street (west to east) and from Boylston Street to Beacon Street (south to north).
You can grab the iCal version of the calendar here, the XML feed of the calendar here, or just view the standard calendar here.
Or, if you have a smaht-phone, you can scan the QR code and load the iCal version right onto your phone.
And of course, since I have a total addiction to buying domains and then throwing half-assed things together onto them, I began adding this info (and maybe more if I stick to it) to Back Bay Parking.