Parking anxiety. It’s a thing. It’s the fear that you will never be able to get out of your car; that you will miss your appointment or engagement, or never be able to start work because there is nowhere legal to park. You may never get out of your vehicle. You will drive until you run out of fuel, or die, or maybe both. Your skeletal remains will be found strapped into the driver’s seat with your indicator still on, waiting for someone to leave.
And to people who sit in their car for 15 minutes texting before they reverse out, can you not do that? Some of us are holding up the flow of traffic waiting for you to vacate your space. There are rules around claiming a park – and sending your passenger into the fray to hold a spot is not one of them. A pedestrian doing improvised traffic control guarding the space while you perform a 23 point turn is not okay. You have lost the spot. In the rules of Parking Survivor, it is the next driver who is technically able to nab that spot. That’s what I told the dude when I backed into the spot he was baggsing. He was very angry. I told him that I was a feminist and men telling me what to do did not intimidate me. Then he gave me a ticket. Turns out he was a parking ranger. Rude.
There are clearly more cars than spaces to park them in. It’s how the game works. That’s why councils employ parking officers. Scarcity of supply is how you make money in the capitalist system. It’s like a crab trap. Except, you’re not in a wire trap, you are in a clearway at five minutes past four and you’re fucked. If you want to confirm to anyone that life is meaningless, that no one cares and everything eventually goes to shit, give them a parking ticket.
In some states you can go to jail for not paying your parking fines. Imagine that! Prison time for parking in a permit zone without a permit, like an animal. What a risk to a civil society – person who parks with abandon! Imagine the conversation in the prison canteen:
‘What are you in for?’
‘I murdered my family. You?’
‘I parked in a no stopping zone.’
I am writing this knowing I have to move my car in 51 minutes. It’s one-hour parking from 8am–6pm. I’m in Melbourne, and in the apartment where I am staying there is only street parking. If you are lucky you’ll nab the two-hour spot. There are half a dozen four-hour spots, but you need to be doing blockies from dawn to get one. I don’t know how people live like this. I eventually found ten-hour parking but I have to get a tram back to my pad. Parking is big business. I even found someone selling 60 spaces on a real estate site for $45k.
I hate paying for parking. It feels like ‘pizzo’ – protection money to the Mafia. Except when you don’t pay they don’t break your legs, they just break your spirit one infringement notice at a time. I once had a boyfriend who always got the ‘rockstar’ park. That’s the park directly outside where you are going. It wasn’t always legal. In fact, it rarely was. By the time we hooked up he had thousands of dollars in fines he had to pay, but wow, he’d had some pretty tasty parking. I’ve always loved bad boys. And the parking anarchist was next level. It’s amazing what a turn on being a non-compliant vehicle in a loading zone can be.
Parking sucks. Thinking about where to park; planning where to park; remembering where you’ve parked. Last week I couldn’t find my car. I walked the car park for about an hour, I had that rising panic, thinking maybe I would be there forever. Then I remembered. I’d caught the tram.My car was back at my apartment in a four-hour spot. Although now I’d overstayed – so I had a ticket. They never leave anything nice with it, like an affirmation, or well wishes for my family, just negative vibes.
Parking Survivor is the new reality show. We are all contestants. Every fricking day. And the prize? To come back tomorrow and do it all over again.
