The mailbox parking ban bill approved unanimously last week by the Harford County Council is a pointless bit of paperwork that will only serve to get the county government and the sheriff's office in the middle of disputes between neighbors that should be resolved by those neighbors.
The bill makes it illegal to park within 10 feet of a residential mailbox on the grounds that postal regulations allow a letter carrier to hold on to mail, if the mailbox in front of a home is blocked. The law, which is backed by a $25 fine, came into being because of complaints from people whose mailboxes were blocked. Such complaints are legitimate enough. A blocked mailbox may mean someone ends up having to make a trip to the appropriate post office during post office hours.
Getting to the post office during its business hours can prove to be an inconvenience; the notion that some people ended up having to drive miles to pick up mail from the post office is a bit of a lesser concern, as few places in Harford County are all that far from the post offices that serve them.
Still, if someone parks in front of your mailbox and your mail isn't delivered and you end up being inconvenienced, it's a pretty unpleasant situation. The more appropriate venue for complaints than the county council (or now the sheriff's office, since this matter has become law), would have been the offending neighbor.
"Hey, neighbor, would you mind asking your visitors not to park in front of my mailbox? I had to drive all the way to the post office last week to pick up my mail."
"Oh, sure, neighbor. Sorry about that. My brother-in-law is something of an oaf. I'll remind him next time he's in town to show a bit of common courtesy."
While there is a possibility that such a conversation might spark neighborhood discord, it's nothing compared to what's likely to result from one neighbor calling the cops on another to complain about a car blocking a mailbox.
If the problem of neighbors behaving in an unneighborly way by parking in front of each others mailboxes were ridiculously out of hand, it's probably not a matter that's worth sending the police out for on a regular basis. As it happens, though, the problem isn't rampant. It's a problem that has been particularly acute in the aftermath of the snow storms of the past two winters. In other words, the county council's new mailbox parking ban is in response to a problem that arose during record snow storms when extenuating circumstances were fairly common, and when police had better things to do than write $25 parking tickets and referee arguments between people who should be able to figure these kinds of things out for themselves.