Prius Hilton #9: Parking and Nighttime Incident
Some quick updates first…
I found this cool place to do laundry in the Mission district called Laundré. It’s basically a combination of a laundromat and a cafe, which just makes the whole experience nicer. I’ve never been to one of these before, but I’m excited to check out more of them in the future.
I’m planning another week-long road trip where I’d be working remotely. This time though, I want to be able to cook for myself for at least some of my meals, instead of always eating out. I have some preparations in the works for this, which I’ll show in a video once everything is in order.
Parking
It didn’t take me long to find a nightly parking spot when I first started living in my Prius. For a month and a half, I parked along a semi-busy, well-lit street with plenty of open spots only a couple blocks away from work.
The one downside, which I didn’t realize was a problem until later, was that it was particularly close to the freeway, maybe about 200 feet away. It’s something I started to think about when I developed a light, lingering cough, which was more pronounced after waking up in the morning. I can’t claim that the cause of the cough was the pollution radiating from the freeway and I’m not inclined to run any experiments to find out. But regardless, I started to worry about the long-term health effects of living in a polluted zone.
With that in mind, I updated my criteria for long-term parking spots:
- safety
- consistently available parking spaces
- flat street surface
- less than a 15 minute drive away from work
- more than 500 ft away from a freeway
I doubt that a 500 ft threshold strictly means that I’m safe, but it seems like a good enough heuristic for now until I can do further research on the subject.
Looking for a new parking location, I went to Mission Bay, which I believed checked all the boxes. In particular, there’s an area next to some soccer fields and apartments where all the street parking is metered (in general, streets with metered parking have plenty of open space at night).
After parking here for a few nights, my cough went away (again, not claiming causes), and I just really liked the location. It’s a quieter, calmer area, since it’s away from the main street and the open fields make it feel less cramped. As a cherry on top, if I wake up at the right time, my car is situated so that I get a great view of the sunrise by just opening my eyes and looking through the hatch window.
I got a scare a few days ago though. The end of the active time of the parking meters changed from 6 pm to 10 pm! This was a bummer because I usually try to park and get ready for bed around 9 pm. The crazy part was that the parking cost was $7 per hour! This whole thing was annoying just because of how absurd it felt. Thankfully, I came by the next day and found that the price had decreased to $.50 per hour. I’m not sure if they just made a mistake initially with the $7 price, but I would have grudgingly moved away if that was the normal price. As it is, I’m okay with paying $.50 each night for this spot, but I can’t believe I almost got priced out of my neighborhood!
(Honestly I was a bit annoyed in the moment, but I’m mostly joking. It’s difficult to truly relate, but I am sympathetic to people who are actually being priced out of their homes.)
Nighttime Incident
One of the risks I mentioned previously about this living situation was potentially not waking up to being paged while on-call for work. Funnily enough, I did get paged earlier this week in the middle of the night even though I wasn’t on-call (technically I’m on backup on-call duty 24/7). Fortunately, I did wake up, though just barely.
The incident itself was pretty gnarly, and my coworkers and I were dealing with the issue for a couple hours. However, the fact that I was partaking from inside my car didn’t hinder me much. Tethering my phone gave me a fairly stable connection, even if it wasn’t as fast as I would have liked. Luckily, my laptop had a full charge of battery since I was getting low towards the end of it. I think I’ll make it more of a point in the future to get it fully charged before going home.
One of the unfortunate side-effects of the incident was that I wanted to be able to sleep in, and ideally, without interruptions. This posed a problem because I was parked in a metered spot, which required payment starting at 9 am. Also, street parking outside of my office fills up by 8 am. I decided that I would just re-park in the middle of the night, before going back to bed. I considered two options, either parking at my office, or parking on the outskirts of the city where there weren’t restrictions. I chose the latter because the area around my office doesn’t feel very safe in the middle of the night. I ended up working from a cafe the next day after waking up around noon and not feeling great.
I wouldn’t say I mind having to adjust my schedule because of these (hopefully rare) events, but it’s just something to keep in mind and worth having a plan ready ahead of time.
