>From NYT Reflections on a Parking Meter By CLYDE HABERMAN <http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/author/clyde-haberman/> Not to make too much of a relatively minor event, but when Manhattan's last old-time parking meter was yanked down on Monday, it meant the end of a symbolic target for some rebellious spirits. [The Day] The Day <http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/category/the-day/> Clyde Haberman offers his take on the news.
To them, parking meters represent an infringement of their freedom of movement. Did anyone in the Old West make a cowboy pay to tie up his horse outside the saloon? Nor is this solely an American notion. In Australia, the No Parking Meters Party <http://noparkingmetersparty.org/> came into being a few years ago, running candidates in state elections in New South Wales with a slogan that "the basis of democracy is non-dictated policy." Writing about the final curtain <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/nyregion/uprooting-the-old-familiar-p\ arking-meter.html> for the parking meter in Manhattan, 60 years to the day after the first one was installed, my colleague Michael M. Grynbaum alluded on Monday to the 1967 film "Cool Hand Luke <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=EE05E7DF1738E260BC4A53DFB767\ 838C679EDE> ." In its opening scene, the title character, played by Paul Newman, is arrested and dispatched to a prison road gang for drunkenly lopping off the heads of meters with a pipe cutter. Back in 1967, some people in the New York theater where I saw it cheered as Luke went from meter to meter, methodically decapitating each one. To them, it wasn't an act of vandalism. It was a free spirit's rebellion against those in power, by attacking one of their more soulless creations. Perhaps those same people would have pumped their fists joyfully had they witnessed the uprooting of Manhattan's last single-space meter from its post on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. Not that meters have disappeared from the city. Hardly. Tens of thousands remain in other boroughs. But they are doomed, too. In a year or so, the city's Transportation Department expects multispace Muni-Meters to be the rule everywhere. The relationship between some New Yorkers and their parking spaces can run deep, even as the city becomes ever more bicycle conscious perhaps especially as the city becomes more bike conscious. You don't have to own a car to understand that. I haven't owned one in 33 years. Yet an available parking spot right in front of my apartment building is so alluring that it almost makes me want to rush off to buy something to fill the space. Throughout Manhattan and in parts of other boroughs, the hunt for a perfect spot, one where a driver may leave the car for days without fear of a summons, is no less an obsession than the pursuit of the white whale was for Ahab. Politicians certainly understand this. It helps explain why, over the years, they have steadily expanded the exemptions to the alternate-side parking rules, usually in the name of paying tribute to some religious or ethnic group. The Transportation Department now recognizes 32 holidays <http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/motorist/scrintro.shtml#calendar2011> , with a total of 42 days, when the rules are suspended and sanitation trucks are thus unable to sweep. It is one of New York's peculiarities that the chosen method for honoring various constituencies is to leave the streets dirty. With a run of Jewish, Roman Catholic, Muslim, Hindu and legal holidays upon us, there will be a 44-day stretch, from Sept. 29 to Nov. 11, during which alternate-side parking regulations will be lifted one-third of the time. For me, the rebel's romantic concept of parking meters as an enemy no longer holds, if it ever did. An opposite thought is more dominant: Why is public space, a most precious commodity in this city, allowed to be used as a private storage area? Years ago, I asked in a column if it would be all right for a New Yorker in a crowded apartment to put a chest of drawers on wheels and leave it at curbside <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/30/nyregion/nyc-alternate-side-of-realit\ y-parking-rules.html> observing all parking rules and taking a chance on theft. The very idea was, of course, absurd; you can't store personal property on the street. Why, then, is it O.K. to do that when the wheeled property is called a car? If public space is to be used for this private purpose, perhaps what the city needs to do is greatly expand the areas where people must pay for the privilege. Not that this could be done without fierce resistance from some on the City Council and in the State Legislature. Generally speaking, when it comes to the proper place of the automobile in this crowded city, what we have, as Cool Hand Luke found out in his own way, is a failure to communicate. 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