following the pheromone trail
About a two weeks ago, I noticed that someone had parallel-parked their Honda Insight in front of the building next to my office, where parking has always been diagonal (like the rest of the neighborhood). Mind you, there are no lines painted on the pavement, but I've worked here for a year and it's always been diagonal parking.
Here it is, two weeks later, and every single day there has been a handful more cars that have also decided to parallel park, thereby taking up at least two spaces each. I don't know if these people are just showing up in the wee hours of the morning when no one's around, and just deciding to park as the other long-term cars had parked...but I really would think that, in a neighborhood like this, enough of the cars would be "locals" that the original trend would snap back into place. Besides, the street is freakishly wide when there aren't diagonally-parked cars on this side.
Yesterday, in the green zone (12-minute parking) right outside our front door, I saw a minivan parallel parked amidst a sea of diagonally parked vehicles. I've seen this minivan hundreds of times. There's an old hispanic dude who's always sitting in the driver's seat, always in the green zone, every morning. I'd always assumed his wife was down the street returning their recyclables or something. But this dude, who clearly knows the drill, comes in and takes up three parking spaces with his parallel-parked van.
There are no signs. There are no placards. There are no notices that parking rules are changing. As far as I can tell, one outsider came here and parallel parked in the wee hours of the morning when nobody was around, and left his car there for a day or two. And others followed his lead because there weren't any lines on the road.
We are ants. And we're lost without guidance.
Too bad the parking situation already sucked ass before this started.