What's the crack with all the ARSEs?

There was something in the morning freebie last week about a guy who parked his car in the vicinity of a LUAS stop, perfectly legally, in order to take public transport to work. Fair play to him – I hear you say - for saving the planet, improving the city’s air quality, and saving the lives of sundry cyclists, pedestrians and drunks by not driving his car over 30 km/h in the city centre.

Not everyone was so appreciative however, as when he returned from his hard day’s slog he discovered his car was minus a windscreen wiper. “Random vandal” he thought. The following day he discovered his windscreen covered in some oily substance. It seemed that somebody – with the leisure time to sit in their living room all day, twitching the curtains - didn’t like him parking on the public road, outside his/her house.

You get it around my locality too, but even here they are too civilized to resort to wanton vandalism. But someone from the residents’ association called around with a leaflet a while back, complaining about people parking on the roads near the local train station.

As I say, here they are more subtle, but every bit as petty. Their preferred method is to place those little yellow plastic cones – obligingly supplied by the boys and girls in blue – on the miserable bit of road in front of their houses. I should also point out that we all have off-street-parking here, in the form of driveways, so parking is not a problem for residents.

Ironically, not that long ago there was talk of increasing the size of the nearby train station’s car park, but the residents didn’t want that either, citing “increased traffic” as their grounds for objection.  So, if people can’t park on the public roads due to residents objecting, and if a decent park and ride facility can’t be built because the residents object to that too – what the hell are commuters expected to do?  Sit at home all day, presumably in some subsidised form, listening to Joe Duffy and gawping out the window?

As far as we in Gombeen Manor are concerned, people can park wherever they want on “our” street, as long as they don’t create an obstruction. But then again, we work for a living. As such, we don’t have the time nor the inclination to hinder other people who do the same thing, but happen to live further from the train station than we do.

You’ve all heard of NIMBYs (Not In My Back Yarders), I’m sure?   Well, here it looks like we have a lot of ARSEs getting into a sweat about where people should park their cars.  

Any Road Somewhere Else.

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