Boston wants to take away your parking spot...

Via Mark Krikorian at NRO- who has an interesting political take on it - comes an article about how Boston wants to encourage the stealing of freshly-shoveled-out parking spots.

In Boston - and other cities, including MadAnthony's adopted home in Baltimore - it's common to "reseve" the street parking space that you shoveled out by placing an old chair, a bench, or other piece of furniture in it to show that it's reserved. This is fair, since you spent hours shoveling that spot out - and since you don't really have a place to leave your car once you've left if you come back and have to shovel out a new spot.

Boston is banning this, however - and going as far as removing the items that are reserving the spots. The NRO post I linked above sees this as taking away private property - and in a way it is, since despite the spaces being on public streets, they are cleared by private citizens. The need to save spots in cities comes from two things - the fact that many in city government see cars as an evil that should not exist in cities, and thus do whatever they can to discourage people from having places to park them - and plowing that adds to the amount of shoveling that people have to do to get their cars in or out of a parking space - since you have to shovel not only the snow that fell, but also the snow that was plowed around your car.

In Baltimore, where we only get a few big snowstorms, this isn't a big deal - but in a city like Boston, that gets more, people spend a ton of time shoveling - and should be able to park their car in the spot they shoveled out, even if it means sticking a chair in it.

One also wonders if Boston has anything better that they could devote taxpayer-funded public works employees to do other than removing chairs from parking spots - like, I don't know, shoveling or plowing snow?