JP Considers Banning Space Savers This Winter

JAMAICA PLAIN, MA — Winter is coming. And that means putting in hours of sweat and muscle to shovel out your car from underneath the snow. Before you head out for the day after that shoveling is done, do you pause, and pop a broken chair, a cone or some other item in the space you just dug out? Or do you just hope that the good karma of shoveling out a space will mean you'll find some place to park when you get home from work hours later? The two sides of this years-long debate will have the chance to debate which is better Tuesday in JP.

In Boston, drivers can save parking spaces with an object for up to 48 hours after a snow emergency has been declared for the city, according to municipal rules. South End banned the practice in 2015 and now JP is considering a similar proposal.

The Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Council public services committee will be discussing the future of parking space savers at its meeting at 7 p.m. Dec. 4 at Curtis Hall and are asking neighbors to come weigh in.

Proponents of the space savers say space savers is only the fair thing to do, especially in areas where there's not enough street parking to begin with.

"If I shoveled it, it’s mine," posted one person in the JP forum on Facebook.

Snow shrinks the already limited number of places to park. Add that to bans on snow emergency routes, and finding parking can make you want to cry.

Perhaps that's why every winter, there are a number of police reports of vandalized cars or public disturbances related to space-saving.

And the aggression is where opponents come in, between threatening notes left on the cars of owners who don't know about or don't care about space-saving to the fisticuffs some say the ban is embarrassing.

Someone called it an outdated "anachronism" in a post announcing the meeting on social media.

Although saving spaces in Boston may have started in the late 70s or early 80s, the late Mayor Tom Menino began the 48-hour rule in 2005. Neighbors resisted the rule at first as trash trucks tossed space saver away right after 48-hours, they'd come out and put new ones in the spaces.

“People who shovel themselves out have a moral right to that spot. They have invested their sweat equity,’’ James Kelly, a City Council member, told the Washington Post back then.

Boston is not the only city who practices this: Snowy cities with dicey parking situations like Chicago and Pittsburgh have their own forms of space-saving policies. In Minneapolis, where finding parking is less of an issue to begin with, the city sometimes restricts parking to one side of the road, so they can plow.

Do you use a trash can, cone, or some other object to save your parking space on the street? Here's what you need to know:

• You can only use a space saver when the City declares a snow emergency.
• You have 48 hours to use a space saver after we end an emergency. After that, you must remove it from the street.
• You actually have to shovel the space in order to save it.
• Don't put a cone in a shoveled space if you didn’t work for it.
• Don’t put the snow you shoveled into another space or on the sidewalk.
• When you dig out a space, you have to expose the pavement.

Photo by Jenna Fisher/Patch Staff