Anyone who has ever lived in a large apartment complex knows the chaos that erupts every weekday after five in the afternoon. There are painfully few parking spaces, families often have two cars, and people circle the blocks like predators, hunting for any available patch of asphalt. In such a situation, every single spot counts. That’s why it makes your blood boil when one of the best spots right in front of the entrance turns into a private junkyard for one inconsiderate neighbor.
That’s exactly what happened at our building. Our neighbor from the second floor, Mr. Volejník, bought an old white Ford Transit years ago, its sills eaten away by rust. He used it for construction jobs and side gigs for a long time, but last spring the van finally gave out—the engine apparently died and oil was leaking from the chassis. Instead of having the immobile vehicle scrapped at a junkyard or towed to private property, he solved the problem his own way. He parked the large van right in the middle of two parking spaces under a streetlamp and just left it there.
Within a few weeks, the van was overgrown with weeds and moss. Volejník even turned it into his outdoor shed. Whenever he cleaned up at home or cleared out the basement, he stuffed the van with old tires, rusty pipes, leftover drywall, and dirty paint buckets. Through the rear windows, you could see a pile of dusty junk stacked to the ceiling.
The problem was that the van sat motionless on the public parking lot for months, taking up space for two regular cars. In October, the technical inspection expired—the red sticker with the overdue date was clearly visible on the windshield and license plate. When people came home from a twelve-hour shift and had to park half a kilometer away in the mud by the main road, the sight of Volejník’s rotting junk storage was enough to drive anyone mad.
At first, I tried to talk to him as a neighbor. I met Volejník by the mailboxes and politely asked when he planned to move the van: “Neighbor, parking here is a disaster and your van has been sitting there for half a year with an expired inspection. Couldn’t you take it to the scrapyard?”
Volejník just snapped back arrogantly: “Why do you care? The car is parked on public property, it has plates, and it’s my property. I can keep whatever I want in my parking spot. When I have the time and feel like it, I’ll fix it. Until then, it’s none of your business.”
When a friendly agreement failed, we turned to the municipal police and the local transport department. But here we hit the classic wall of bureaucracy. The officers came, walked around the van, took photos, and left, saying that since the car still had license plates and no broken windows or missing axles, by the letter of the law it wasn’t an obvious wreck threatening the environment. They did send the owner an official notice to remove the vehicle with the expired inspection, but Volejník simply never picked up the registered letters at the post office.
Months passed, the van continued to rot quietly in the rain, an oily stain grew under the engine, and everyone in the building felt completely helpless. Volejník just laughed in everyone’s face every time he walked by.
The last straw came in winter during the first snowstorm. Road workers couldn’t get through with the plow because of the abandoned van and couldn’t clear the strip along the sidewalk, so deep icy ruts formed and one of the elderly neighbors broke her wrist trying to walk around the wreck. That was the final drop.
We joined forces with the HOA chairman, wrote a collective complaint signed by forty tenants, and filed a report with the health department and environmental office because of the clear leak of operating fluids onto the pavement. We attached detailed photo documentation of the leaking oil soaking into the soil by the lawn and dozens of records showing the vehicle was being used as an illegal construction waste dump.
Only the threat of a massive fine for soil pollution and hazardous waste finally forced the authorities to act quickly. An official final removal notice was posted on the van, and Volejník received a warning that if the wreck wasn’t gone within seven days, a tow truck would remove it at his expense to an impound lot with a daily fee of five hundred crowns.
Only when Volejník realized that this time he’d be paying tens of thousands out of his own pocket did his arrogance suddenly disappear. On Saturday morning, a friend of his came with a tow rope, and together they shamefully dragged the junk-filled van out of the snowdrift and hauled it away to the countryside.
After a year and a half, two parking spots finally opened up for normal families. It was a bitter lesson for us about how easily one selfish person can exploit loopholes in the rules at the expense of an entire neighborhood. Unless you apply hard, persistent, and systematic pressure through health and environmental authorities, the offices won’t budge on their own and the wreck could easily sit there for another ten years.
