One famous film quote says that men are like parking spaces: The good ones are already taken and the rest are too small.
Yuliya PopovaNow if we were to adapt it to Ukraine, our parking situation seems more like women: there are quite a few of them – you just have to assess which ones come for free and which require a little payment.
From April 1, you won’t have to pay for parking unless there is a parking meter. And it’s not an early April Fools’ Day joke, unless, of course, officials postpone the law again.
Passed by the central government in 2009, it was delayed by two years first and then another three months on Jan.1 in the hope that the city would become a parking heaven with meters for every 9,000 legal car spaces.
Meter or no meter, drivers for now leave their wheels everywhere – from curbs and sidewalks to bus stops and tram tracks. The ancient city has been virtually taken over by vehicles with little respect for green spaces, let alone pedestrians.
There are many reasons for this: insufficient parking spots, lack of signage, personal ignorance and disdain for the rule of law. And so by the start of 2012, we only have 14 percent of all parking lots equipped with parking validators of one type or another.
Parking officers are to be replaced by parking meters by April 1. (Kostyantyn Chernichkin)
Moreover, the city has to figure out how to make drivers actually pay for their stay, a task much harder than buying the pay gadgets. Within the last decade, there were many punitive experiments, from wheel locks to tow trucks, but none of them survived more than a few months.
Sometimes it was getting plain ridiculous: I once struck a flowerbed in a parking lot on Pushkinska Street and lost my license for a while because of the mishap. Backing into a legal spot under a half-lit street lantern on a winter night, I suddenly felt a slight nudge, which seemed like a brick under a wheel.
And as accustomed as all motorists are to stones, potholes and hedgehogs on the roads (those are rampant in the Obolon district), I kept my foot on the gas thinking that the prickly mammals are asleep and it must be only a lump of ice.
Turns out it was a square, grey-stone flowerbed, under a blanket of snow, etching into my bumper. Feeling very disappointed, I rang the police because in Ukraine if you want your insurance company to cover something bigger than a nail scratch on your car, you have to get a dovidka (written proof) from the cops.
When the officers arrived, however, they were not impressed by my parking skills and took my license away, saying that I violated the parking boundaries by hitting the flower bed (which by the way remained intact unlike my bumper.)
As I don’t give bribes, I had to surrender my license, appear in court two months later, pay a Hr 300 fine and then drive around police offices for another two weeks delivering more dovidkas to retrieve the license.
After that incident, I confess that I stopped paying for parking. I felt that the law was not on my side, so why would I be playing straight?
Not the kind of behavior I am proud of today but it was what it was.
Besides, not every human parking enforcer in a fluorescent jacket actually deposits Hr 7-10 (the standard hourly parking fees in central areas) into the city coffers. Luckily, authorities must have felt the same way, finally choosing machines over people to collect cash.
So I think there is finally a green light at the end of this tunnel.
Consider the United States’ example. Parking bans and time limits have been imposed there since roughly the 1910s, according to the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.
In 1935, a department store manager in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, initiated the first public meter to increase the “turnover” in front of his shop. It took about a decade for drivers to get used to the fact that they cannot park anywhere they want, and after trying various tricks from breaking to stealing meters, they gave in and began paying.
History repeats itself with every new immigrant who arrives dirt poor and will do everything possible to avoid paying a couple of dollars.
Covering the meter with a plastic bag to confuse a parking officer who is tracking electronic signals that expose cheats is one popular method of non-payment. Another trick is to wipe off a chalk mark that officers use on your tire to see if you’ve overstayed your welcome.
In this sense Kyiv is not far behind. From cutting off wheel clamps with a saw to threatening “fluorescent” enforcers, poverty makes people crafty.
But the good news is that we are on the way to getting meters now. I take it as a sign that in a decade or so we will start behaving ourselves, avoid sidewalk parking and navigate flowerbeds properly.
Yuliya Popova is the Kyiv Post’s former lifestyle editor.
