and so it begins...

'Tis a trifle, a little thing this thing here. A spot for the blahblahblah and the yaddayaddayadda. And of course, here I am sitting in front of it and I have Blank Page Syndrome. What the hell fascinating things do I have to say?

(ok, so technically, I wrote this a few days ago, but bear with me... )
Here goes: I sit here in the Panera Bread ("NEW! from Panera! Suck you in with Free Wifi to then sell you Really Quite Average Breadstuffs(tm)") in the place of my birth (Evanston), I'm one of those pinheads in the window sitting behind a laptop chuckling to himself - buying one cup of coffee and then parking his ass for hours, not buying anything else. But the fascination of the moment is: The Parking Spot Half-Life. You know the phenomenon... in a city where parking is a premium, and people will circle a block 4 times hoping a spot opens up, as soon as one does, they snag it, recklessly diving at it like famine-starved tribesmen mobbing a UN relief truck full of rice. So anyway, that parking spot is unoccupied for what... 5 seconds? Great for city revenue, and immensely entertaining to watch. Of course, I'm a little disingenuous here, because more often I'm the guy snagging the spot than I am the guy jabbering about the guy snagging the spot.

So the whole point of this is: what if there were a metric that the city parking authority or downtown development association had to measure this? Sort of a parking space duty cycle. Or fill factor. Or occupancy rate. You'd have to normalize it against day of the week, time of day, and season or holiday and compare it to foot traffic, but you could measure something like that, I'd think. And I would think that someone in local business would want to know something like this, right? enh.

It's not like I've thought of this often or anything, but living in Ann Arbor, parking is pretty scarce when students are in town. I like to think that I have perfected the the Ann Arbor Parking Manoeuvre. Imagine you have accepted that you are in a part of town and time of day when the half-life of an available spot is non-existent. And that you really want a spot. A spot opens up across the street (going the other direction)... what do you do? You duck into an alley, pull the 3-point turn, and take the spot, that's what you do. No alley? Is the road wide enough to pull a U-turn (legal or otherwise)? And I should mention... you get bonus points if you speed up to pull into the alley, so that you block oncoming traffic with your 3-point turn, preventing some other poor sap going the other direction from getting that spot. Now THAT's a competitive spirit when it comes to parking. We won't even get into "Parking Spaces of Uncertain Permissibility" (the spots that are defined NO parking certain hours, but don't say anything about the other hours).