Winter Parking Rules: Is it ethical to claim dibs on a spot you’ve shoveled?
Strange things happen when people stake claim on public property…
When I asked Randy Cohen, the erstwhile “Ethicist” of the New York Times Magazine (now working on an ethics show for public radio) about the practice, he said while he understood the gut-level “exasperation” to “see some non-shoveler pull in just as you pull out,” he opposes winter dibs on ethical grounds. “Shoveling out your car is simply the price you pay for storing your private property in our public space,” he said. After all, shoveling the sidewalk in front of your house (if only for a fear of a lawsuit), does not, Cohen points out, “transform it into your personal property. You can’t charge a toll to passers-by who want to walk on it. You can’t barricade it with hideous lawn furniture or suspiciously numerous beer coolers.” Cohen has a point. Imagine a city transformed by winter dibs logic: a person demanding access to a subway seat on the grounds they had wiped up a coffee spill on that very seat during their morning commute; a parent at a playground demanding a child give up a swing because they had earlier shoveled the snow off it for their child. It would be madness.