Long odds
April 4th, 2009
Parking in Baltimore is always a matter of playing the odds. Thursday night I parked on the red dot and got broken into; however, I rarely see shattered glass on that road so I considered it quite safe. On the walk back home, I noticed an open spot on the much safer blue dot and briefly considered moving my car. If you park on the bridges (green dots) you probably run a 2-5% chance of a break-in. Spots are always available there at night (and you don’t need a permit), but no one ever parks there. On any given day there are probably five telltale piles of tempered glass at the curb.
This is all within about a football field of my house. Baltimore’s weird like that. There are fewer break-ins here than in Fell’s Point, so really I was improving my odds in moving here. Insurance premiums do not scale with auto theft rates at all, because the Baltimore PD will never write a report without serious property loss or an accident dispute. I estimate that I’ve saved roughly enough in insurance premium reductions due to underreported crime & accidents (there is literally an accident every two weeks a block from my house) to cover my busted window.