h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In many cities in the US (at least in the Boston area), if you park on the street you are required to drive your car at least once every two days.

Apparently the cities felt that cars were being neglected and feeling unloved, so they made it illegal to park in a particular spot for more than 48 hours straight. So if you go on vacation, or simply don't use your car all that often, you may want to hire a "car walker" to take your car out on little jaunts to the park where it can run around and play with the other cars, sniff their bumpers, and play fetch.

In some other towns in the Boston area, you are not allowed to park on the street at all early in the morning. Parking on the lawn is, however, perfectly legal.

I've seen lots of variations on this. Some places have "two hour time limits" and such. Makes more sense when enforced with a meter, but they won't ticket you if you run out every two hours to feed more coins.

Some streets there's a certain time every week you don't park on one side because of street cleaning. Hard to remember sometimes, at least it would be for me.

In one place I remember very clearly though, a strange one. It was a one-way street with just enough room for parking on one side and one lane of traffic on the other side. Well, the way it was signed, you park on one side for three months, then the other side, switching every three months! Hehe, I suppose it's for cleaning as well, but I don't know why they wanted 3 months of crud to build up, unless that's how infrequently they cleaned there anyway, in which case it wouldn't matter.

The craziness of the two hour limit is the maximum stay of two hours but no return within one hour scenario. So say you stay for 59minutes in one spot would you be allowed to drive away and return in 62 minutes, within incurring a penalty. Probably not unless you can guarentee that the traffic warden saw you leave the first time and hadn't just clocked you on arrival the first time. As otherwise you could have been in that spot for the maximum two hours and where now there 1 minute into your third hour. This actually happened to a friend of mine only with about 10 minutes extra grace but could he argue the point, no.