Cold war: City pulls plug on space savers

Roxbury residents interviewed by the Banner showed little support for Mayor Martin Walsh’s directive for city workers to remove space savers from shoveled-out parking spaces that began Monday this week.

When garbage trucks completed their routes Monday afternoon, folding chairs, orange safety cones, milk crates and other makeshift markers remained fixed in numerous spaces on streets throughout Boston.

The space savers occupy the rarified patches of cleared pavement that punctuate seemingly endless banks of plowed and shoveled snow piled four to eight feet high along side streets. While work crews have cleared the snow banks from many major throughways — Warren, Washington and Seaver streets, Humboldt Avenue and Columbia Road — smaller throughways like Walnut Avenue and Townsend Street remain choked with snow banks, forcing cars to back up when school buses and trucks pass.

The city has already spent twice its $18 million annual snow removal budget and filled several large vacant lots with snow removed from city streets. Yet more than 100 inches of snow has landed on the city, and forecasts this week projected more snowfall, heralding a possible topping by winter’s end of the record set in 1995-26 of 107 inches.

With no timetable or certainty that snowbanks will be removed from side streets, many Roxbury residents are calling on the city to back off of its space saver policy.

“I think the city needs a couple more weeks,” said Kaidi Grant, who lives in the Fort Hill section of Roxbury. “There definitely has to be a concerted effort to get rid of snow banks. There’s no way the city can take away these space savers without starting a civil war.”

Parking guerillas

The city’s war on space savers may have a bit more in common with the Vietnam War, with space savers disappearing during garbage collection, only to re-deploy hours later, ready to defend their turf against an invading army.

“What I’m hearing from constituents is that the continuing need for space savers is based upon snow not being removed from the streets,” said District 7 City Councilor Tito Jackson. “The critical component is how to accelerate the snow removal process so that there’s more space. What people really want is enough space for everyone to park.”

The city’s Public Works Department has been removing between 1,000–1,500 truckloads of snow from neighborhood streets every night, according to a spokesperson for the mayor. In total, Public Works has removed over 40,000 truckloads of snow from neighborhood streets.

But on side streets in Roxbury — and throughout the city — there’s little evidence of municipal snow removal, save for the single lane plows have eked out for auto travel.

In Grant’s Fort Hill neighborhood, a local listserv erupted with angry messages in response to Walsh’s announcement of the space saver ban, which ordinarily goes into effect 48 hours after a snow storm, but was waived during the January and February snow storms.

“People drive in from Randolph and Brockton, park their cars here and walk to Roxbury Crossing to take the Orange Line,” Grant said. “There are senior citizens who paid people to shovel out their parking spaces and keep them clear. There are families with young children. The city needs to understand that we’re still under siege here.”