Space-saver season returns to Boston
No parking space saver incidents to report from this storm — so far.
Boston Police said they hadn’t heard of any arrests or calls associated with the time-honored snow emergency tradition as of Monday morning.
Bostonians have long placed traffic cones, trash cans, porch chairs or really any odd object as “space savers” in spots they’ve personally shoveled or plowed out. In 2005, the Herald reported that someone employed a toilet stuffed with trash to save their parking spot following a storm.
While many residents are in favor of the practice, especially in neighborhoods where parking is limited, over the years it has led to slashed tires, fist fights, and at least one stabbing.
In 2012, a court convicted Carmen Andino of stabbing someone who moved her space saver. The victim, it should be noted, was the one who’d shoveled the spot.
Usually, space saver incidents are less violent, but still costly.
Following one February storm in 2013 alone, the Herald reported that: a man had a saw horse thrown at his Jeep and a woman had her tires slashed in Brighton; a heating repair man had his window smashed for partially blocking someone’s shoveled spot in Roxbury; an a Dorchester man had two tires slashed.
Beginning in 2004, residents have had to remove their space savers 48-hours after a snow emergency is lifted, lest they risk the Department of Public Works coming by to trash them.
“There’s violence out there,” longtime Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino said the December after implementing the policy. “People have had their tires slashed, windows broken. There’s been real problems with the parking spaces.”
“I can understand 48 hours, but after that, the streets are more passable and it’s time for the Department of Public Works to get out there and pick up this rummage sale,” Menino said.
Since Menino’s tenure, the policy has ebbed and flowed in terms of enforcement.
At times, the city has cracked down on space savers, and at others, it has ignored its own 48-hour ban or even extended it in cases of heavy snow.
The South End was the first neighborhood to outright ban the practice in 2015, though some have still used space savers and incidents of vandalism continued in the neighborhood as recently as 2021. Currently, the South End and Bay Village are the only two areas of the city to ban space savers.
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In recent years, Bostonians have not had many excuses to use space savers, or fight over them, because the city has seen so little snow.
Sunday’s storm was the biggest snowfall Boston’s seen since 2022.
A trash barrel and two orange cones mark a shoveled-out spot in South Boston on Monday.(Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)
Space savers in Southie as people dig out from the snow storm. (Nancy Lane/Boston Herald)
