Re: [OT] Judges discover constitutional rights to bike lanes and also drug use in homeless shelters

On 2025-05-06 7:33 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

On May 6, 2025 at 12:28:41 PM PDT, ""Adam H. Kerman"" <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:
 

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
>

. . .

>

We used to be able to park in front of the house overnight if we wanted,
for example if there was an overnight guest who'd come by car. But the
city banned overnight parking many years ago.

>
Parking infringes upon shared use of the public way, and overnight
parking usurps the public way for private use. There's no issue with
short term parking but there's sure as hell an issue with long term
parking.

 Here's a guy who stuck it to NYC when they tried to tell him he owned the
sidewalk and the street for purposes of personal injury liability for
pedestrians and cars.
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doQBGhwKVR0
 "The property is yours when ownership is inconvenient and expensive for us,
but it's ours when we want it for parking and sidewalks."
 

The laws about snow removal are another variation on this issue. Our bylaw says that snow must be removed from the sidewalk by the property owner within 24 hours of the end of the snowfall. The full width of the sidewalk has to be shovelled down to bare pavement or you can get a ticket. And not a $5 ticket either! They send a city work crew around to do the shovelling.
[City work crews have been notorious for decades for being massively overstaffed and just as massively underworked. They are famous for sending a crew of a dozen people to do absolutely any job. When you watch the work actually being done, there is one guy working at any given time and the rest stand around and "supervise" until it's their turn to work. There is NEVER more than 1 working at a time. (I had a summer job 50 years ago where one of the other employees at that job told me about being on a city work crew the previous winter where a dozen guys would go into the woods to cut down some trees and the first thing they'd do is set out a dozen lawn chairs, get a campfire going, and then take turns working where 11 guys would be keeping warm around the fire while the guy whose turn it was to work would work on cutting down a tree. I don't know how long it had already been going on at that point but the pattern hasn't changed.]
Now picture what the bill would be for them sending out a dozen unionized guys to do the work of one man. So they have the power to force you to clean up THEIR sidewalk but no obligation whatever to shovel it themselves.

I don't remember the
rationale they used but I think they were worried about snow removal
being more difficult if cars were parked on the street. Then a few years
back, they put in bike lanes - bike lanes that basically only run down
our street but don't connect to anything else, making them esentially
useless for getting around town. Then they put in a cross walk which has
an island in the middle of the road but which is almost never used. (I
can see it from my kitchen window.) Because of the island, it is now
illegal to even STOP on our block so people actually risk a ticket even
for stopping for a moment to drop someone off. Progress!

>
That's ridiculous. The whole point of a road is to access property. Of
course it's there for pickup and delivery, and to allow people to get
dropped off or picked up.

  

--
Rhino