You're doing it right. We live in a city with parallel parking, it's much harder to get into a tight spot than it is to get out of a tight spot, but it's a curse on the whole block when multiple people leave 3 feet between their cars and effectively erase two otherwise viable spots as a result.

It's not coincidence that those things on the front and back of our vehicles are called bumpers.

...or the West Philly location, 816 S 47th Street

Man, I haven't had a Suffering Bastard in years.

Though I haven't been to La Chinesca on Spring Garden, and while it's not Tiki, the Mexicali/Chinese fusion and mid-century theme might hit resonant notes.

For six years, I've been voluntarily doing what Glitter pays people to do. Typically ~1/4 of the trash I bag is stuff left behind from municipal pickup.

The street trash issue is multi-generational & the city's solution is ripe for disruption.

Glitter monetized the process of activating regular neighborhood cleanups and I'm actually not mad. On extra bad days (think: diapers, needles, piss bottles) I think about Patreon/GoFundMe. But I never really follow through because, candidly, it's not my job and I don't want it to be my job.

On weeks where I've actually swept the street with my fucking push broom, our street corner looks cute - to me, it's an excuse to get outside, and I've met a bunch of my neighbors this way.

But hey let's hold out for an un-scalable job expansion to pay reluctant employees to half-ass it. Great.

There are definitely companies that have automation around things like the recording of new deeds. The kind of personal information that you could only easily dig up if you worked at a collections agency is now... just on the internet. Google yourself and your phone number, and you'll find a page with all your old addresses and phone numbers, your family, all scraped from public sources or lists that got hacked and shared.

I just like to blame the bank and the real estate agency. "Just initial all these pages and sign this, this, and this." Who's going to look for marketing language in all those documents?

Same. I gave up on rideshares from the airport years ago. Worth noting, the flat rate went up to $33 about a month ago. I accidentally came off like an asshole to a taxi driver a couple of weeks ago because he didn't have the meter running and did a couple of fast moves on the Curb device, and it wasn't the dollar value I was used to seeing.

He showed me on his machine that the flat rate is $33, and it occurred to me that those little posters they used to have - showing the boundaries of the flat rate area, and the cost - as well as taxi drivers licenses - aren't in taxis anymore, because none of the cars have those barriers between the front and the back anymore.

Anyway - Lyft to the airport, cab home from the airport. It's great.

Flat rate from the airport was $28.50, post-tip was always $36 for me. They just bumped up the flat rate to $33 - first increase in decades. I'm also about 15 minutes away, and waiting 7 minutes for a Lyft or Uber to meander around the airport got old a few years ago. If I'm tightening the belt, I can wait, and if I want to be home in 15 minutes, I'll go to the line of taxis and jump right in.

I used to take the R5 into the city for work, never had much use for taxis, but a bunch of my colleagues had stories about having to call the cops over paying their taxi fare. And early on, "machine doesn't work" was the norm, not the exception. Yes, taxis are regulated. No, having to invoke that regulation on the regular was not a better experience.

You know what I haven't had to do since the rideshare revolution? Argue over how much I'm paying or how I'm paying it. I take a cab home from the airport every time I'm flying home. They're now cleaner, friendlier, and all around better. The taxi system overplayed their hand for a long time, and now everyone in their industry is worse off for it, but customers are better off.

Yup! I work in Old City, and have walked past work where they've pulled the wooden mains out for replacing with modern infrastructure. Blew my mind a little bit.

The pressure here on the third floor ain't great either.

Anecdote time! We did a gut-job renovation on what is now our home in Philadelphia.

Contractors jack-hammered the street and the sidewalk to run a new connection from the water main in the middle of the street. You need a permit to block the street for a day or two, a backhoe comes out to break up and move the hard stuff, a bunch of dudes with shovels worked through the dirt, put down new pipe, and put steel plates down on the street to cover the work temporarily. The bolts on the steel plate that are meant to keep it fastened to the street inevitably pop out of the street within days, so all day, all night, vehicles drive over the plates with a CLUNK CLUNK that shakes your entire house - especially dump trucks. Flatbed trucks make a sound like a traffic accident when they go over these plates.

New sidewalk is put down pretty quickly. Weeks(?) later, contractors come out to pour concrete over the new work in the street, and put a temporary asphalt patch on top of that. A few weeks later, the asphalt patch has compressed, and that has to be re-filled - which takes a month or two to actually happen. And then anywhere from six to eight months later, the Streets Department comes out, blocks the street for a day, scrapes out the patch job, and finishes the surface properly.

Oh, and we had to pay $200 for a new water meter, too.

Now, this was done as part of a comprehensive construction project. If I wasn't a crazy person, and just bought a regular home that mostly just worked, I could see the appeal of not giving a toss about what's going on between my home and the middle of the street. And as far as the city goes, Philadelphia doesn't even do street sweeping, there is absolutely no way they'd proactively take on an infrastructure upgrade project like this on their own. If the street consistently develops sinkholes, they'll fix it, but now you're looking at months without vehicular access to the street in question, and that kind of disruption can cause catastrophic damage to small businesses.

That said, Truth or Consquences infrastructure is barely a century old, and billionaires own significant tracts of nearby land, this does seem like a solvable problem.

Yeah, every few blocks along Front street, there used to be stairs to the waterfront. There's only one remaining set between Vine and Callowhill Streets. Now there's a highway.

Callowhill's where the 'cliffs' kind of evened out, and that street sits 16 feet above sea level.

Lots more detail at Hidden City

Most of the street-parking paint damage I have is on my bumpers - which is fine, they're called bumpers for a reason. The second most noticeable issue is the haze that develops on headlights over the years. At first, I bought the kind of headlight renewal kit that works with my cordless drill - polishing compound and sealant, etc. It was a lot of work, and only lasted about a year. If your headlights get hazy - just buy new ones on eBay.

On that note, the main thing I've done since moving to Philadelphia, with respect to my shiny vehicle, is get a sun shade for my windshield. There's only so much you can do about the exterior - might as well do what you can to protect the interior from the sun.

Had to get a couple of windows replaced recently because of vandals. I'd call them thieves, but there was nothing for them to take. The most recent one only shattered the window in place - Safelite used a rope saw to remove it, and scratched up my paint. They paid to get the paint fixed.

I think the reality is, living in an urban environment reminds you that a car is a utility, not a trophy or a work of art. Certainly not an investment, either. You know what (typically) helps with accepting that your new car will get dings, will have strangers leaning on it, will get broken into? Buy a slightly used car, and put the thousands of dollars you saved into an auto maintenance account.

I'm late to the conversation, but when I went out for lunch in Old City today, and there was a noticeable white haze outside. Probably going to make for a pretty killer sunset.

You'll want to follow the 'official' page for the area, where increasingly downsized renderings like this one will continue to get posted as progress gets made.

Republicans don't actually understand what the word impeachment means. I'd call this the dog catching the rabbit it's always chasing, but it's more like the dog getting stuck in the fence.

All that happens with speed tables in the city is that the people who live on a street with speed tables have to deal with the constant shaking and noise of cars blasting over them at speed. And the ones they install on 2nd Street don't last. The end up as piles of broken plastic and tire-mangling bolts sticking out of the asphalt.

I'm okay with traffic calming measures that jut into the street though. When we visited England last year, my wife did all the driving. "What the fuck is this?!" she exclaimed, slowing down because the street suddenly got narrow. The system works!

Still, neither of these are going to erode the culture of speeding quite like speed cameras. It may take longer, but when you keep getting dinged for speeding, over and over, you generally change your behavior. And at the very least, they can tell a story about how the proceeds from speeding cameras can go to something that benefits the community. No promises that it actually gets accounted for properly. Automated enforcement is notoriously abused once you get people in power that turn a blind eye to it.

Red light cameras get abused, and have been found to increase accident rates - but speed cameras I can get behind.

I mean yeah, it sucks the first time I was shooting down an eight lane road in DC at 65mph, only to find out a week or two later that the signs said 45, but you can bet I never sped in Washington DC ever again.

Having visited a few places where speed in urban areas is enforced, it was jarring coming back and realizing what I'd acclimated to. I mean, I still deal with it, but it sure would be nice if fewer people would blast through Old City streets at highway speeds.

When I visited London last year, I was researching Airbnbs and apparently that kind of experience is practically the norm. It's a huge problem over there. You see a listing that looks nice, and you get put up in a shabby apartment building that's been converted to 100% short term rentals.

There's a Facebook group, Riverwards L+I Coalition, where all your questions have already been answered.

The big ones for me: Make sure their insurance includes insuring your building. Text or email making it known that they need permission before walking on your roof. Get a Nest camera and spend the $12/mo for 60 days of footage access. Don't be afraid to talk to the developers and the construction team - talk about how you want to make sure both parties are protected, and make it clear that you're available to talk to if they need anything. Point the camera out and tell them it's there for the protection of the neighborhood - they'll appreciate it because without fail, someone's going to try to break in and steal their tools one night. You can keep track of permits on https://atlas.phila.gov/

And like everyone said - photographs! Take photos of where your walls meet your ceilings, of the new construction as it goes up, especially where it connects with your house.

Good luck! Hopefully they don't have to do any underpinning!

Well, this is a little bit tricky because this is written as though you, upon renting, would take ownership of utilities. However, you can probably assume that everyone else who's signed a lease has the same agreement.

I guess the main thing is: You don't take over someone else's debt, full stop. If your landlord wants utilities to be in your name, they should draw up a new agreement that puts down, in black and white, how utilities are split among the other tenants, and I would even argue that having to take on the responsibility of managing the utilities for the other tenants should be worth a reduction in your rent. That may be pushing it, but hey.

My advice would be: speak sensibly and reasonably, agree to pay your share of what you've used so far, but draw up a new agreement, because the current one doesn't reflect the proposed usage.

> I would check the language in the lease as it relates to utilities.

Exactly this! This is what legal documents are for. A nice, black and white definition that you can point to and say, "we both agreed to these terms." The reality is, if the landlord gets squirrely, you may be in a situation where you either batten down the hatches and engage in a protracted legal battle, or you determine that it's not worth the effort, and you go somewhere else. I once sublet from someone who, it turned out, was not supposed to be subletting. I'd seen some fishy nonsense with another tenant who was moving out as I was moving in, so I changed the lock on my bedroom door (very, very easy to DIY), which proved to be a prescient move. But before you even do that - read the lease.

Fantastic! Thanks for sharing - are there any plans to put more of these images of the 70 originals online?

I saw pinch points in England! My wife was driving, and was like, "What the fuck is this" while slowing down. Mission accomplished, lol

We had a pair of trenches in our street from new construction tapping into the water main. Loud as fuck all day, and as an added bonus, it would shake the house - especially when an 18 wheeler or a bus went past, which wasn't uncommon because we're very close to a bus parking lot.

Unfortunately, I don't think any traffic calming technique is going to be effective in Philadelphia. There's a remarkable lack of self awareness by drivers in our city.

One of the ways I could alleviate the noise in our situation, since the trenches only crossed half the street, was to drag traffic cones into them. That worked for 48 hours max, before someone plowed right through the cones. Eventually enough people managed to drag them off under their car that I switched to a PGW folding plastic barrier. Usually good for a few days, and then wham - someone would just drive right through the damn thing.

And I can't make this rant without pointing to another post from today. Philly drivers just do not give a fuck.

Oh this is the one I kept getting ads for right? Something about catering exclusively to Philadelphia, with pictures of models in front of the Brooklyn Bridge.

In this case, the truck genuinely doesn't stop at their house. But those motherfuckers have a garage, and a stay-at-home adult son. There's literally no excuse for putting trash on the curb the day after it's been picked up.