The funniest part is that you can’t park in Bristol, because the rich jackoffs who own single-family houses in the higher parts of Clifton (the “fancy neighborhood”) wanted to be able to park their cars on the street in front of their houses. They can park there but now nobody else can park anywhere. There USED to be free on-street parking throughout most of the city. It was first-come first-served, but you could always find somewhere to leave your vehicle. But obviously that was terrible.
When we lived in a rented flat in Clifton, we frequently had to park the car - please restrain your gasps - ON THE NEXT STREET,
Like, I want you to really pause and savor the indignity of this problem, SOMETIMES, we COULD NOT PARK IN FRONT OF OUR OWN FRONT DOOR -
WE HAD TO PARK ALMOST A BLOCK AWAY SOMETIMES, LIKE HEATHENS, AND WALK,
BECAUSE THERE WERE OTHER CARS ON THE STREET,
like, that was an outrage, obviously, that was shocking. Parking at the other end of a street! Or sometimes even a block away! In a city! For free! Have you ever HEARD of such hideous living circumstances? Leaving your car, for free, somewhere convenient in a city, and having to walk A CERTAIN LENGTH to your final destination.
(And if you were disabled and planned to live somewhere for a while then the council would come and paint you a Specific Parking Spot in front of the place you lived. but everyone else had to walk sometimes, and didn’t always get the exact parking spot they wanted, which was an outrage, because the DISABLED PEOPLE WERE GETTING THINGS AGAIN.)
And if you want to go shopping in Bristol then sometimes!! it’s!!! easier!! to walk!! than to drive, in this perfectly-sized city, bursting at the seams with everything you could possibly want, with free parking, so that sometimes - SOMETIMES -
YOU! WOULD! LEAVE! YOUR CAR! IN FRONT OF SOMEONE ELSE’S HOUSE! Sometimes in front of a Rich Person’s house.
OR! you might go to work somewhere! And you might park near your work! In a space that was free because NOBODY WAS USING IT AT THE TIME, which is obviously stealing, because a Rich Person might want that space at any moment.
anyway, this state of affairs was CLEARLY impossible for the Rich Folk, who were nearly perishing under the strain of parking only slightly-adjacent to their own homes, in the heart of a desirable city.
“There’s too many cars here!” they wailed, and begged their Mayor, Mayor Red Trousers, to do something. “We can’t park exactly in front of our own houses at any time of day we wish, because sometimes a PLEB is parked there. For free! Paying nothing! They have no right! We ought to own the street in front of our houses!”
So they abolished free on-street parking across the entire goddamn city. Bristol is now Residents-Only. You can ONLY park your car in the neighborhood where you LIVE. You are not supposed to drive to another neighborhood to work and leave your car there. You are not supposed to commute from outside the city by car. Like, at all.
When people said “But Mayor Red Trousers, this city is a place where a lot of our jobs are, and many of us cannot afford to live IN it anymore, so we uhhhh, we drive to work, what are we supposed to do with the car?”
Mayor Red Trousers replied, magnificently, “Take the buses.”
“Have you met the buses in and around Bristol,” the people asked carefully.
“If more normal working people took the buses,” Mayor Red Trousers said with apparent seriousness, “Then the buses would be better.”
“The buses operate on a different time schedule to the rest of civilization, make us improbably late for work, and somehow cost all of our lunch money,” the people said. “We cannot use them.”
“That’s because you don’t use them enough,” said Red Trousers; he literally said this in writing, on the Bristol website. “You see, you must outcompete the poors who usually take them,” he added, but he didn’t write that part down.
“Hey,” the people said, reading the fine print, “This says you can only have, like, two cars for every house? Like, only two cars for every individual address?”
“If you want to buy a third car for your teenager, you can buy another permit, but it’ll cost you money,” Red Trousers said with a generous chuckle.
“Okay but do you realize,” said the people, “You’re picturing that only two adults live in each house. But normal people in Bristol live in houses that are subdivided into a flat for every floor. That means that about five households live in every separate house. Sometimes a flat is shared by multiple roommates, many of whom have their own cars. There is actually an average of, like, ten adults for every address.”
“That sounds like poor people talk?” said Red Trousers, bibbling a finger along his lips. “Two cars per house. I’m sorry, friends, but if you can afford to buy a BMW for your kid, you can afford to pay £1000 a year for another car permit.”
“What we’re trying to tell you is that our houses have about five cars each,” the people yelled, “Because we live in flats WITHIN the houses, and this address has THIRTEEN ADULTS living here, not two. Can you rewrite this to, say, two cars per HOUSEHOLD?”
“You don’t need THIRTEEN BMWs,” Red Trousers chuckled.
Eventually it was worked out that you can park in front of your house, probably, if you’re not poor, as long as you don’t take the car to go somewhere else. And you have to display a special permit that Keeps the Plebs in their Places, and if a car from Bedminster or Montpelier is spotted in Clifton it will be vaporized ON THE SPOT
In a city renowned for social justice and rioting with the least provocation, the people took all of this fairly well, because most of the rioters don’t own cars, and thought this was Great and Green and would make everything Much Less Problematic. “This will improve our Green City,” they told each other, because they’re pig-ignorant fuckos, bless them;
Mayor Red Trousers said “This will be green! eco! Greeny greeeny green green. the greenest” and the social justice scene went “but will it be vegan?” and he was like “it’ll be SO vegan, DOUBLE vegan” and they went “Massive!” and didn’t riot at all.
And now you can only leave your car anywhere in Bristol if you’re rich, or lucky.
So after changing the ENTIRE landscape and economy of a city in order to park in front of their own houses with no competition, the rich people then put pigeon spikes ON TREES to prevent the pigeons from shitting down onto their cars,
those self-same cars; to protect those parking spaces so ferociously fought for and won, in the public street outside their homes, those exact same BMWs and Audis that they casually threw over an entire city’s infrastructure to enshrine in front of their houses,
Thus causing Friend Jennifer to go “ARGHLEBLARHGLHE” on social media for a bit, because she likes birds, (like, she REALLY likes birds, she’s an official Friend to Birds, the birds gave her a medal about it)
Causing the ENTIRE WORLD to flip the fuck out,
That is the socioeconomic context with which you should hate these pigeon spikes.
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