The other night, I gave a coworker a ride home from BART. It'd been a while since we'd taken BART together, so as we exited the station, she asked me what I thought of BART’s “reserved parking” scheme. I was pretty calm, at first.

“Well, it sucks ass. Nobody uses it – it’s fascist. It costs $60 a month”
“60 dollars a month??!! Wow.“
“Yeah, 60 dollars a month. I thought the reason why people took public transportation was to save money, you know, cut down and gas and mileage, and not pay for parking in the city. At 60 dollars a month, that’s like, 3 dollars a day. You might as well just pull your pants down and bend over. And it’s not like they’re creating more parking – they just appropriated one of the nearer parking lots, and started charging for it.”
“Aren’t they building a new parking structure over there?” She indicated some buildings under construction, where there used to be a parking lot.
“That’s what I thought, at first. I was pretty happy about it, until I found out that it’s some kind of ‘transit village’ redevelopment gentrification bullshit. I mean, traffic flow around here is terrible. It makes no sense. Why the hell don’t they do something about that? They won’t do anything about the parking situation, nor about the traffic situation. This strip mall is gonna make things even worse.” I said, starting to get agitated.
“Redevelopment gentrification bullshit…” she chuckled. “You’d think if they were gonna call it a transit village, it’d have something to do with public transportation.”
“No! It doesn’t. It’s not a parking structure and it’s not a bus or train station. It’s probably going to be 5 Starbucks, a Pasta Pomodoro, a Gap and a Pottery Barn. They haven’t even bothered to erect any kind of lighting around it, and I have to walk through it in the dark at night, feeling *real* safe. So they take away that lot to make it into a strip mall, they make you pay in another lot, ticket you if you park before 10 a.m. in one of the close lots and…”
“Wait, they ticket you if you park there before 10? That’s just wrong.” she asked, exiting the fare gate.
“Yeah, it’s for the lazy asses who don’t have to get to work until after 10. That lot over there, the closest one, is also off limits, because it’s also under construction. It’s probably going to be another… hey!!” I examined my ticket. “It appears that they’ve raised the prices.” I said, through gritted teeth.
“Ummm, yeah they raised the prices on January 1,” she said, shooting me the “where have you been?” look.
“Fuck that shit! It’s not like they’re improving anything! Fuck the Milbury BART and the fuck the SFO extension! None of that shit is ever gonna happen! All that money is probably going into Willie Brown’s pocket somehow!” I shouted, incensed.
“Errrr, maybe I shouldn’t have brought any of this up,” she said carefully.
“Well, I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating this. See, I’m already in a bad mood when I get here in the morning. I’m not a morning person, and I’m pissed off about having to go to work in the first place. Then, I have to fight off a bunch of other drones for parking that’s in the boonies. It’s not even summer yet, which is when more people take public transportation, and the furthest lot is full before 8 a.m. When I get to the station, I have plenty of extra time to stare at that strip mall before squeezing into a four-car San Francisco train, because inevitably, the train is late due to ‘electrical problems’, a ‘medical emergency’ or a ‘police incident’. And they have the gall the raise prices and charge for parking? What*ever*. They should give us a refund every time they’re late. We should just revert to socialism. Maybe the trains would run on time. Everything would be taken care of.”
“Um, okay Connie,” she chuckled.
“Maybe I should stop, before I get more pissed.”
“Yeah, I think you should.”