Cars parked in Mt. Pleasant. If they leave, are their spots fair game?

If you need to drive somewhere in the District today, getting there won’t be too much of a problem. Parking, though, might be.

While the city has done a good job clearing snow off of local roads, it has been left to residents to not only clean off their cars, but also dig a path through the snow so that they can actually move their cars. It’s tiring and time-consuming, and since not everyone is doing it, there are far more cars on the roads than there are available on-street parking spots. In cities that get more snow, it has become practice to dig out your spot and mark it with pretty much anything — a chair, a shopping cart, a traffic cone, a relative — that says, “Hey, I shoveled three feet of snow off of this spot and would like to come back to find it still available for my use.”

The Cleveland Park listserv, always rich with discussion on just about every issue, has pondered this question in recent days. One irate driver wrote: “I have noticed that the side streets are filled with primitive, improvised stakes at otherwise unoccupied, but shoveled parking spaces. I drove down several streets where the number of such staked claims exceeded the number of parked cars, and leaving no parking on said streets. Do other residents find this depressing evidence of a society turning increasingly feudal? Folks, I appreciate that you worked hard to shovel your car out, but you do not own the street, even that portion of it in front of your house. Please do not feel miffed when I (or my civil compatriots) park our cars in ‘your’ cleared spot.”

A respondent disagreed, noting, “[I]t only makes sense that the people who spend the effort to reclaim a spot from the plow-created snow drifts should benefit from the fruit of their labors.”

Not according to District law, though. WTOP is reporting that the District Department of Transportation seems to want to tamp down on any DIY on-street spot reserving, noting that anyone who tries to set aside a public parking spot for their future use can be slapped with a fine.

I haven’t seen many people try to hold their on-street spots, but I can see why they’d want to. I spent the better part of an hour shoveling my car free from the grips of two feet of snow, and would hate to see someone who didn’t toil away like I did just pull in and take the spot like it dug itself out. But these are public spots, and we know we run the risk of losing them once we drive away. I’m just not driving my car until the snow melts.

How is everyone else handling the precious on-street spots they’ve shoveled out?