Category: San Diego

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The city of San Diego has moved from free trash service to paid trash service. This wording is a bit of a mystery as trash service was never free — it was included in our taxes. But never mind. Semantics.

Part of this process was to replace the old black trash bins with the new grey ones. This is necessary, or so we are told, in order to know how to bill customers. Environmental Services will pick up the chipped grey bins and have stopped collecting trash in the old black bins. So the thousands of black bins are no trash and being, I suppose, tossed into a trash land fill. This sounds both environmentally and economically wasteful. Perfectly good bins are now trash because the city wants to track who should have their trash picked up via the new user charge. Instead of the much more efficient system of picking up all the black trash bins on the street because everyone is a tax payer.

In order to put this new process into action, the city is confiscating the old black bins and replacing them with the new grey bins. Except we didn’t get the new grey ones, our old black ones, however, were confiscated. This leaves the question of where are we suppose to dispose of our trash.

The city, ever willing to help, has a customer support number for just such a problem. A quick call and all will be resolved. Right. This would work, I suppose, if there was anyone answering the phone. Bob tried one afternoon and after a hour plus of waiting gave up. He did manage to get in after about 40 minutes wait the next day.

So the customer service agent resolved the issue and new grey bins were delivered to our home. In your dreams. The customer service agent told Bob that their records showed that the grey bins were delivered to our home. Bob reminded the agent that he has spent a couple of hours waiting to talk to someone because there were no grey bins delivered and we have no place to dispose of our trash. She helpfully noted that Bob could go up and down the block checking the serial numbers on our neighbor’s trash bins to see who made off with our bins. That is right. We are supposed to go looking at our neighbors trash cans, find ours, and claim it. All hopefully without a confrontation with the neighbors.

Bob, of course, refused this choice and escalated the problem to a supervisor who he is hoping will return his call and get our grey bins delivered so we can dispose of our trash. Fingers crossed.

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I live near downtown San Diego and drive an automobile. This means I experience two problems whenever I leave home. Parking will be limited and I will probably have to pay for it. The easiest and cheapest way to park is street parking which, depending on the time of day, will be metered. So far so good and I accept that this is the way things are.

What I don’t accept is that fucking meters are out of order half the time I pull up to one. In a fair world, this would mean that parking is free. The machine that the city provides to give payment is out of order. How can I pay? But reason is irrelevant when dealing with San Diego Treasury department who are responsible for the parking meters. You are supposed to pay even if there is no way to pay. Understand because they are very firm about this.

So, when I find myself in this dilemma, I scan the street quickly to see if I have an alternate. Hopefully this gave you a few moments of amusement because you already know that there is rarely an alternate and that I have already spent the last half of an hour driving the neighborhood looking for an open space. I am tired of looking, late for my appointment and now angry at the world for putting me in this position. In these cases, I usually make a quick sign of the cross and risk it. Sometimes I get a ticket, sometimes I don’t.

What irritates me is the city’s position on this. I made a genuine effort to feed the beast but the beast refuses to bite. Perhaps, and I am guessing here (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) that part of the problem is the parking meters are a good source of revenue for the city. In the last fiscal year $7.3 million in traffic fines were collected. Now if all this money came from malcontents trying to dodge the meter, I would say fine the shit out of them baby. However, as I have pointed out, some of this money comes from good and faithful citizens trying to do their civic duty and pay the God damn machines and who were unfairly fined because of broken parking meters.

To make matters worse, I hear that the City Council is making it easier for new building contractors to get exemptions on the new construction laws which require that new buildings have a parking place for each person in a unit. They are, in fact, allowing new condos without any parking whatsoever. Why anyone would buy a new condo without parking is beyond me but then I suppose the desperation to own something, anything at all, has gotten so bad that there are people who will pluck down a million dollars to own a condo without parking in the most congested part of the city. But I digress.

Oh, and then there are the bike lanes. Yes the bike lines put in by the city in the hopes of changing San Diego’s dependence on the car and pursue a more ecologically minded form of transportation like bicycles. Well, unsurprisingly, it has failed miserably. I can stand in a bicycle lane for hours at a time without seeing a bicycle. The net result for the city’s efforts is less parking spaces and the streets are more dangerously narrow to the extent that I can hold conversations with the drivers in the next lane.

So in review:

Parking is difficult in San Diego.

So parking must be paid for.

Even if the parking meter is broken and is unable to take your payment, you have to pay.

The city is exempting contractors from building more parking in new buildings so they are making parking even worse than it already is. Why they are doing this is a mystery. Oh, wait, it may not be a mystery at all — campaign donations from contractors might have something to do with it. I am not sure but I am throwing that out there for your consideration.

In order to encourage better ecological behavior on its citizens, the city has also taken away parking by building new bike lanes thus making parking even more challenging and driving more dangerous. All to accommodate the 5 bikers who use the bike lanes.

On the other hand, I do live in America’s finest city.