The current budget situation in California is slowly creeping into our lives deeper. Now, the effect is visible in many smaller areas in the system which weren’t affected that much before, or at all, by the decrease in funding for school and local city projects, including development in many densely populated cities. There is visible increasing in imposing fees and fines for various “facilities” on the residents. In the city where I currently live, there is a law that parking in areas where there is a board stating that there must be no car parked in areas within the visible distance of the signs. This law had not been practiced for over 10 years.

Now, the entire county, the city included, has started imposing fines and parking tickets on the residents. Even more strange is the fact that almost all the streets near universities and schools, where there is no such sign posted and parking is allowed normally in such places all over the country, have the same rule being applied to them. The local police here started giving out tickets to any car parked in open street between the hours of 2 am and 5 am. I got a ticket recently for $20 [not a huge amount] for parking in such a street. Someone I knew suggested I contest it by video taping the place where I got the parking ticket, and showing on the tape that there is no visible street sign there [the nearest sign stating that rule is about 2 miles away]. Then he suggested that I appear in court to show my “evidence” to the judge. It is a big hassle in my opinion.

Now many people get up around 2 in the morning, block someones’ parking entrance or garage door, and then move their cars again around 5 in the morning. There simply isn’t enough space for parking anymore beside the streets. Most of the cities in this county do not have a parking permit system, and the city I live is one of those cities. It was argued before by the city officials [notice the word official, and not representative] that such a system would be uncomfortable for many residents. Now such a system of having permits seems more comfortable to the city residents, but the city officials still prefer parking tickets to parking permits.

By contrast, Berkeley in Northern California seems to have a much better and organized parking system through the use of parking permits, even though finding parking there takes a lot of time. The UC Berkeley itself does not have a single student parking area, and even the staff parking is limited to less than 10 spaces to be given each year to those who either display some “extraordinary abilities” [become invisible?] or do some special work in the field they are working in.

Below is a picture I took a few days ago in Berkeley, near UC Berkeley, of a street packed with cars. Notice the “interesting thing” under the wipers of the GMC truck. Some spaces are free, others have meters. Either way, parking is there. The only issue is that there are a lot of cars and a lot of people, and even though Berkeley is not that small, the city was designed to rely more on the BART [Bay Area Rapid Transit] system and the buses, and probably on your feet, than entirely on cars.