Letters on parking passes?

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

I just got a new residential parking sticker and visitor passes, and they have a big "B" on them. Somerville isn't going to districted parking, is it?

Comments

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

I think they are keeping the option open if they decide it's the best way to deal with Beacon Street, but nothing has been announced yet.

[samcoren.livejournal.com]

I hope one day we can defect and officially take up the name Camberville. First you give us our own special parking sticker, and then we become our own municipality. It's a natural progression.

Also the best way to deal with Beacon Street: Don't greatly inconvenience a neighborhood and a hundreds of routine bike commuters with a dangerously designed experimental cycling facility that only covers small stretches of road to win brownie points for the mayor's administration.

Seesh.

[smoterh.livejournal.com]

Actually the track is much safer option than lines on the pavement. Biker community is very much in favor of the cycle track.

[samcoren.livejournal.com]

This is false - only *some* of the bike community is in favor of tracks. I've met with several cyclists who don't support the design and many of them spoke at February's hearing. Riding behind parked cars is a great way to get hooked to death by turning vehicles. You're still going to have regular painted bike lanes for half the length of the street anyway. The design is purely a vanity project at this point.

[cden4.livejournal.com]

Yes there are a handful of experienced cyclists that are opposed to cycle tracks. And they have every right to speak out at public meetings.

However, all of the transportation advocacy organizations are in favor of them: Boston Cyclists Union, MassBike, LivableStreets Alliance, as well as the Somerville Bicycle Committee and Cambridge Bicycle Committee.

They are also nationally an accepted type of facility, endorsed by NACTO (National Association of City Transportation Officials). Their new Bikeway Design Guide has much guidance on how to installed them on a city street. New York, Chicago, and Portland have recently installed cycle tracks and are in the process of adding more.

Plus, we already have them in Cambridge and Boston with more planned.

No bike facility is 100% safe. But cycle tracks have been shown to strike the best balance of safety and comfort, appealing to a much wider audience than bike lanes or shared lanes would. And it has been shown that there is a safety in numbers effect. The more people there are biking, the safer it becomes as motorists become used to looking for them and operating safely around them.

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

i think the letters have been around for awhile, and are intended for some use of expiring different areas' parking passes in different months.

[kelkyag]

Visitor passes have been districted for years (and I think are technically only good in a small radius of their home address, but certainly only in their zone).

[smammy]

On the back of your visitor pass is a precise definition of where they work. I don't have one in front of me but I remember it making sense.

[kelkyag]

Now being able to check mine: "The visitor parking permits allow a visitor to park in legal spaces on the street or adjacent street of the resident he/she is visiting."

[smammy]

Hm, not so precise or unambiguous as I remember...

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

In Cambridge it is more specific; the visitor permit has a map on the back showing where this permit is valid. But in Somerville, yeah, it's a lot more vague. I've always assumed that was deliberate, to give the parking officers discretionary power.

[samcoren.livejournal.com]

Visitor passes have always had letters; Resident passes have always had numbers. The new "2014" resident sticker made me do a double take when I saw one for the first time. So used to them being round, I thought they were for Cambridge from a distance.

[littlecitynames.livejournal.com]

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

[wombatbanana.livejournal.com]

If your parking pass has an A on it, it means it expires at the end of January in the given year.

If it has a red A, it means you've committed adultery.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

FTW

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

I mean, what else are "visitor" passes for?

[enhf94.livejournal.com]

Four or five years ago when they talked about it in my Resistat, the city staff were well aware that businesses and residents favored ciitywide sticker-permits pretty strongly. That may have changed (I doubt it) or city staffers may have rotated in/out (a little more likely) or the city may someday decided it's necessary (possible but not my recent impression). Please note my data is way out of date.

But as noted above, those letters aren't about this particular thing.

[i-leonardo.livejournal.com]

some percentage of the neighborhood around sullivan square is very vocal about feeling peevish that "outsiders" park near the T stop during the day. i found a bunch of references to their complaints in alderman meeting reports going back at least a few years and i vividly remember a couple of them showing up at town meetings related to permit changes in the magoun square neighborhood (i couldn't figure out why they were there, but whatever). i didn't see as many complaints from the davis area, which i would expect to have more of a problem.

i have a dim recollection that a couple of aldermen are strongly in favor of districted permitting and i heard a bunch of sturm und drang about how terrible the parking *would* be (eventually) for magoun and ball sq when the green line is extended.

i'll be very surprised if it isn't officially proposed in the next 18 months. i might be open-minded about the idea if the city seemed to have any influence at all over getting the buses to run on schedule, run in the evenings, or have any north-south routes across the city. but that doesn't seem likely.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

I'm confused...visitor permits have always had letters on them, haven't they?

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

oh, never mind, you're talking about the resident sticker, I guess.

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

Well, both, really, but the resident sticker letter worried me a lot more. Districts make my sticker much less useful in general, and make me that much more annoyed with the dept of traffic & parking (which i am pretty severely anyway -- $50 for a resident sticker and two parking passes? Really?)

[emannths.livejournal.com]

$4 per month to park three cars sounds pretty cheap to me...

[emcicle.livejournal.com]

In cambridge I have to pay $25 just for a vistor's pass with no resident sticker, which I think is pretty crumby. It costs the same as a resident sticker with visitor pass. Guess they have to make their money somehow.

[mamajoan.livejournal.com]

FWIW, in Cambridge, a resident sticker allows you to park anywhere in the city even though it is technically "districted." I do agree with you that if Somerville is going to start restricting it such that you can only park in the area represented by the number/letter on your sticker, that would be a Very Bad Thing. I can't really see that happening without massive public uproar.

As far as I know, in Somerville the only purpose of the number/letter is to stagger renewals throughout the year, rather than have the entire city trying to renew within the month of January (which I believe is how Cambridge does it). From that point of view it does seem weird to have numbers on stickers but letters on visitor permits, so if this change is just intended to fix that, then I'm okay with it. Though I must say that if they are going to standardize on one system, I wish they would go with numbers, because it's a lot easier for me to mentally translate "2" into February than "B"!

[aislingk15.livejournal.com]

The resident stickers already had a letter on them, they were just a lot smaller. There's a B on mine to the left of the box with the number on it.