The Davis Square Community

You're right, people should be encouraged to use public transportation. There are options for long-term paid parking elsewhere, as well as several "Park and Ride" options which I should have suggested.

I guess I just find it a little surprising when people don't consider the cost of parking/storing their car part of the cost of car ownership.

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I guess I just find it a little surprising when people don't consider the cost of parking/storing their car part of the cost of car ownership.

I would agree, but ... how many people research the parking policies down the level of finding out there is a 48 parking limit, BEFORE they move into a town?

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I would agree with that, too, but as a car owner, I'm always concerned with "where do I put this thing?" when I move to any new location. Especially in the greater Boston area where parking is notorious finicky, and you could wind up in, oh...Brookline, where you can't park overnight at all.

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The 48 hour rule is an oddity, one that isn't found in many places.

Therefore, someone moving into the town is not necessarily looking for "how long can I park this thing" when they look for "where do I put this thing".

It's a bit of a sucker punch, really, when someone finally read the parking regulations, and it's already too late to move.

Reading the parking regulation when you get a parking permit, that's a normal requirement.

Expecting someone to know them before they move here, and make an informed decision based on them, not so much.

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They do. But the cost of parking/storing your car, like car insurance, is variable depending on where you live. Sometimes it's affordable, sometimes it's crippling. There are plenty of instances where someone can live in a city and still have need of a car to make a living, because the places they need to go for their job are not accessible by public transportation.

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I guess I just find it a little surprising when people don't consider the cost of parking/storing their car part of the cost of car ownership.

Do you find it surprising that most don't know about the 48 hour rule until it's too late to do anything about it?

It's not like somerville has that posted on the borders, like arlington does about overnight parking ...

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It's available through the city website, and also comes in the parking regulations included in the New Resident Welcome Kit. Those parking rules and regs can also be found at the Parking office. They might have even had them at City Hall--they had the city map and the Somerville by Bicycle map; they might well have had the parking regs, which I wasn't looking for at City Hall because I already knew them.

The parking info has been consistent, accurate, and thorough in every place I've encountered it. I'm a new resident, and I have not had any trouble getting access to parking information. I don't think it's too much to ask that residents and overnight visitors make an effort to find out the relevant municipal regs, whether that's by consulting City Hall, or by asking your friend who lives there.

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The poster I was responding to thought it would be surprising that people don't take into account "where will I park my car" as a part of car ownership.

I didn't GET a new resident welcome kit.

I didn't own a car when I moved here, but when I got one, and got my parking sticker, that was when I found out about the 48 hour rule, which I had never heard of in any other city I have live in in MA.

My point is that a very odd rule isn't something people look into before moving into a town, and afterwards, it's too late.

Where do I put my car is a very different question than "is there a weird rule regarding how long I put my car there."

It's an odd enough rule that, like Arlington's overnight parking ban, it should probably be posted on the borders.

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You can apply for a new resident welcome kit through the city website; that's how I got mine. The city website is all kinds of helpful regarding voting, schools, on-street parking, public transportation, recycling and trash collection, and other public facilities like the library.

I say this as someone who never got around to registering to vote in my last place of residence because I'm super lazy--it is incumbent upon the new resident to find out this kind of stuff, not upon the city to hunt you down to make sure you know about existing laws. It is not reasonable to assume all municipalities have identical laws. Your trash collection day won't be the same from one town to the next; why would you assume public parking would be the same? City or suburb, every place I've ever lived in had slightly different approaches to public parking, dependent on a whole host of locale-specific issues. It's one of the responsibilities of car ownership in urban life.

You found out about the 48-rule when you went to get your parking permit--where's the problem? When it became relevant to you, you found out.

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Actually, yes. I also didn't have a car when I moved to Somerville. I also didn't get a New Resident Welcome Kit. When I was planning on investing in a vehicle, I had to very carefully run all the numbers to make sure it was feasible, and I googled "Somerville Parking Regulations" to make sure I knew what I was getting into. I've since moved to Southie, and I figured out those parking conditions as well before I signed my lease.

Maybe it's because I'm a fussbudget, or maybe because I'm self-employed and have to budget my dollars to within an inch of their life, but I couldn't take on the responsibility of owning a vehicle without knowing exactly what that would entail.

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That being said, I don't think it's a bad idea to have it posted on the existing parking signs.

And for the record, I'm fully in support of extending the 48 hour rule to something like 5 - 7 days, which would alleviate the need for the whole long-term parking discussion.

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I agree it would be a good idea to have it posted on the signs. It's easily available for people who do their homework, but it would not hurt to have it even more public and obvious for people who, for whatever reason, do not investigate Somerville parking regulations before parking in Somerville.

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