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My neighbourhood doesn’t really have a whole lot of legal motorcycle parking.  There are plenty of bicycle lots (and you can usually keep your bicycle at your building anyway).  Moped lots are cheap as well (3000 yen/month) and car lots are on par with what you would expect in Northwest Tokyo (20,000 yen/month).  If you have a motorcycle, though, your options are limited.  You can either rent out an entire car space (if the car lot owner will even rent to a motorcyclist), or you can park illegally.

Luckily, the police in the area are well aware of the plight of the motorcyclists, and generally they look the other way if they notice a motorcycle, particularly one with local plates, parked illegally.  A police officer once told me “Listen, as long as you aren’t so blatant about it as to park right in front of the station, or right on the main road…  Basically, if you pretend that you’re trying to hide your bike from us, we’ll pretend that you’ve succeeded.”  That said, if too many residents complain that a pile of bikes has got too big or intrusive, the police will put a nice “move your bike” warning out, and you’ll have to find another hidey-hole for a few months until you’re asked to move it again.

This is why I was annoyed to see the fellow with the white moped parked at the left.   Not only was he a moped, which means that there was perfectly good (and cheap!) moped parking less than 50 meters away from where he was parked, but between the way that he parked at an angle and the way that he stuck his helmet out the left side of his bike, he was using up almost half the sidewalk!  Bikes parked like this make it inconvenient for the local residents, making it more likely that we’ll be asked to move our bikes elsewhere.

Compare and contrast with how I’ve parked my bike.  It’s much bigger than the moped, but takes up much less room.  Can’t believe the moped driver is so discourteous…  Next time I may just move the moped back along the fence so that he’s parked in a way that makes sense.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 12:16 pm and is filed under japan, motorcycles, rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.