Goldtent TA Paradise

I got a parking ticket yesterday, which I just paid online. It was $15. I’m not sure if that’s because it was my first or because those tickets are always $15. I suppose I will find out soon.

I parked in the parking garage in downtown Burlington, from which I walked to the studio to hang out with my friend Josh.

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The parking garage used to have a sensible system. Get a time-stamped card on your way in, pay an attendant on your way out.

At some point during COVID, they changed this system.

Now, the choices are:

Go to a kiosk on the first floor and put in your license plate number and pay.

Use a parking app.

Choice 1 is not an option for me because downtown Burlington is flatly too dangerous. My last two visits to the studio have involved frightening interactions with homeless people. In the first case, I was carrying two pizza boxes. The sight of a lone woman carrying two pizza boxes caused several homeless men to decide that she was morally obligated to hand over her food, and they had no problem communicating this belief to me. Nobody put their hands on me, but they got in my personal space and communicated their willingness to do so. Yesterday, an egregious physical altercation started happening a few feet away and I had a “freeze” reaction (sadly, among fight/flight/freeze I still tend towards freezing) and it took one of the participants yelling at me before I could overcome my nervous system’s panic state and make myself hurry away.

In the future, I am probably only going to visit Josh at the studio on days when his schedule will permit him to meet me at the parking garage and walk with me.

So, no, standing at a kiosk on the first floor, quite near where these dregs of humanity prowl looking for potential victims, and pulling out credit cards or cash is not going to happen.

Choice 2 is actually something I would love to use, but the app is designed in such a way to be unusable. To use it, you have to know what zone you’re in. The only way to find your zone is if there happens to be signage near you informing you of it. In the case of the parking garage, there isn’t — or at least, there isn’t in any placement that’s accessible inside the garage in the dark.

If you need to look up the zone, your only option is to “view the Help Center article for your city/area in the Parking Area Specific Info forum by typing in your city name as a keyword and clicking ‘search’.” However, the link to the forum doesn’t work and there’s no easy way to find the forum from the app. If you search for the forum, you get worthless results (screenshot below).

Here’s a link so you can see that I’m not exaggerating.

Searching for the “burlington vt parking garage forum number” likewise leads to nothing helpful. The closest it gets you is a fourteen number range, but there’s no way to know for sure you’ve guessed correctly, and if you guess wrong, you get a ticket anyway.

Having no idea how to navigate this system, and no way to overcome the insanity of abandoning a sane, sensible system for this derangement, I am just pretending that the cost of parking is $15.

The government of Burlington took a system that was safe and usable, particularly for women who would like to use the parking garage while out in public alone, and turned it into a kafkaesque nightmare.

This bullshit is a direct cause of my ordering books online, via Amazon, instead of shopping at the bookstore across the street from the parking garage.

It is a direct cause for my having dinner with friends “anywhere but downtown Burlington.”

The city of Burlington is determined to give downtown to homeless derelicts and make it impossible for people like me to comfortably spend money there, and they’re very good at carrying out this goal.

This is but one of dozens of ways in which American society is rapidly collapsing. Our society needs people spending money and paying taxes to thrive, and our governments are making it as difficult as possible to do so, punishing productivity at every opportunity.

There is nothing I can do about this, of course. I just ordered a couple more books on Amazon, and will continue to do so rather than risk the danger of downtown Burlington or the possibility that a second offense results in towing rather than a $15 ticket.

Josh and I are having dinner on Monday, and we chose a restaurant outside of Burlington.

I (sincerely) hope that my $15, which probably pays for less than one dose of methadone or about half a clean needle for the people whose safety the government of Burlington cares about — and whose behavior they actually want to incentivize — was worth it.

About Me: I’m a data scientist (two years experience and presently job-hunting if you’re hiring). My specialties are presentations that get stakeholders on board by giving them a solid understanding of the math behind recommendations, building custom reporting tools to suit individual client needs, and building/expanding/improving analytic codebases in Python.

About My Substack: My great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.

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