I am pugnaciously pissed by parking pad pulverizers. They don’t have their pinkies on the pulse of passengers pressured and pushed to be pedestrians. In fact, their pundits want to punish by puncturing our pickups and sending them to perdition.

I think they’re just punks.

The Burlington Free Press reports that cars claim about 24 acres in Burlington, Vermont’s, municipal lots and spaces based on the area of a typical 10-foot by 20-foot parking space.

Burlington celebrated global “PARK(ing) Day” last week. The five-year-old secular holiday aims steal back automobile parking spaces and reallocate them as something else.

My mom always said, “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Science has shown that idiom to be factually wrong, at least for fruit flies; the tiny fruit fly likes sweet balsamic and apple cider vinegars better than honey, perhaps because the vinegar is easier to sip. Or because they like, well, fruit.

Anyway, Mom’s human relations rule proffers that we should not provoke the very people we want to persuade.

The PARK(ing) holiday began in 2005 when San Francisco art and design studio Rebar Group converted one nearby parking space into a mini park. They added a roll-in tree, a park bench, and laid sod atop the asphalt. Rebar maintained the “park” for just two hours. This year Burlington, Hangzhou, China, and Tehran held their first events.

It appears PARK(ing) organizers don’t care what we do with the “reclaimed” parking spaces as long as we don’t let cars use them.

One Burlington bright spot has occupied a “car-sized space” on Cherry Street for about a year. Outdoor Gear Exchange reduced the space for its truck loading zone, added a car parking space there, and installed a grand multi-bicycle “parking station” in front of their own store. It’s a bright spot because no one drives any farther to park and we have made room for additional green uses.

Want to persuade parkers? Pilfer a bit of pedestrian pathway next to the parking plot you want to point out and create your public park there. People will get the point. Particularly when they park right next to you.

Parkers have a sweet tooth (after all, there are never any empty spaces in front of Maple City Candies in St Albans), so my mom wasn’t wrong. Making me drive around burning gas to park somewhere else is more of a stick than a carrot cake and is unlikely to make me plug or praise your paradoxical-parking project.