Andrew Clark's Mini buried in snow the morning after a record snowfall.Andrew Clark/The Globe and Mail
To dig or not to dig? To dibs or not to dibs?
Those are the questions.
At least those were the questions many drivers in the Toronto area were asking themselves after the region got hit by a record snowfall on Sunday. Almost 60 centimetres fell with the Ontario Provincial Police responding to approximately 200 collisions and receiving 150 calls to rescue snow-stuck vehicles.
The city shut down and declared pre-emptively that it would be shut down the following day as well. Restaurants and bars closed early. Plays and concerts were cancelled. Essential workers persevered.
When it was all over, the drivers – those who don’t park in a garage – awoke on Monday morning to find their vehicles had all but disappeared, spirited away by an abundance of frozen precipitation.
Andrew Clark: I’ve stopped helping drivers when they are stuck in the snow. And you should, too
I found my poor, little Mini submerged. I had no need to drive and had just spent a few hours clearing a shared driveway. It would take a herculean effort to lay bare my car, which stood on a parking pad behind my house.
I asked myself, “To dig or not to dig?”
That was the question. Whether ’twould be nobler in the mind to slink back into couch-bound slumber or to take shovel against a sea of rising snow drifts and by bulldozing end them.
Tempting as it was to go inside, grab a book and pull up a couch, I chose to dig. Like an archaeologist excavating an artifact, I dug and in an hour the Mini was more or less unearthed. However, it sat in a snowy cubicle and reminded me of the ruins in Pompeii.
After hours of work, Andrew Clark's Mini is unearthed from its snowy tomb on his parking pad.Andrew Clark/The Globe and Mail
Many drivers choose “not to dig.” Let’s call them “snowfall preservationists.” These drivers left their street-parked automobiles encased in snow. Their cars sat deserted like boats dragged on shore for the winter.
Likely the “snowfall preservationists” didn’t have anywhere to go that day and figured they would get to it later. However, if they are waiting for some help from Mother Nature by way of a thaw, they should think twice.
January is not cooperating. And, so far, the forecast for the beginning of February isn’t looking much better. More snow and cold temperatures are coming.
By Wednesday, many of the snowbound vehicles I saw were still buried.
Cars parked on a street on Tuesday near Andrew Clark's house in Toronto, two days after a record snowfall hit the city.Andrew Clark/The Globe and Mail
Other drivers, who had parked on the street, shovelled. Let’s call them “snow relocators.” I was a “relocator” for the decades I had street parking. They didn’t get mad, they got even. They grabbed their shovels, brooms and ice cream scoops and got to work. Some of them left their cars surrounded by snow walls with an opening onto the street. They were like automobile snow stalls. The more ambitious cleared all the snow away, leaving their vehicles occupying a prime patch of cleared parking space.
Ay, there’s the rub.
Once these “snow relocators” were finished digging out their masterpiece, they must have looked up at an unfamiliar snow-swirled sky and shivered as they found what a grotesque thing a snowbank is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created parking spot.
Victory was fleeting. Even after spending numerous hours and burning countless calories, they must have realized that the moment they drove away in their newly freed vehicle another driver would park in the space they had cleared, leaving them with no where to park when they return.
Having contributed nothing, these strangers would enjoy the fruits of the “snow relocator’s” labour.
There is, of course, also a positive correlation between time spent clearing a spot and the likelihood someone else will take it. So why bother putting in the extra effort?
In American cities such as Boston and Chicago (a tradition but technically illegal), they have a solution: you claim “parking dibs.” You stick a few lawn chairs on your space and lay ownership to it.
When it comes to parking dibs, any inanimate object will do. Old couches, broken televisions, a frozen pair of blue jeans, the only limit is your imagination.
Parking dibs has not taken hold in Canadian cities. That may be on account of Canadian “niceness.” We are either “too nice” to claim a patch of public road or “too nice” to take someone else’s hard-earned snow-free spot. The latter obviously isn’t the case or the “snow relocators” wouldn’t have any concerns.
When they do claim parking dibs, Canadians try to hide it. For example, they’ll claim dibs by building fake construction zones that imply contractors are at work. You’ll see a two-by-four balanced between two sawhorses. This gives them unquestioned dibs because everybody knows that contractors are free to park anywhere.
Canadians dibsters also like anything that smacks of government intervention or bureaucracy. The go-to choice for these drivers is orange traffic cones. Two broken chairs occupying a parking spot scream “I’m American and I’m claiming dibs.” Orange traffic cones, meanwhile, say “I’m Canadian and this parking dibs is official and sanctioned by the government.”
Don’t expect parking dibs to sweep the nation. For some reason, Canadians are not too keen on folks “laying claim” to space that isn’t legally theirs . If you try to claim dibs don’t be surprised if you are ignored. As a colleague who lives in Toronto’s west end told me, “There’s an abandoned pylon on our street that people grab and use to try and secure their carved-out spot. It rarely works and has become a stupid game.”