The Philadelphia Parking Authority will more than double the price of a yearly residential parking permit to $75 and cap at three the number of permits each household can buy in an effort to better manage curbside congestion, officials said.

Those changes are scheduled to take effect Sept. 1. The base permit price has been $35 since 1983, when Philadelphia’s neighborhood parking program began.

“This here is an outrage,” Swamp Rabbit said as he showed me the news story about parking permit price hikes. “It’s an attack on my God-given right to own as many cars as I can get financing for and park them where I please. Give me liberty, or give me a house in the suburbs where I don’t have to put up with this shit.”

He was joking, I think. He and I live in adjacent shacks near the Tinicum swamp, in a part of Philly so poor and so far south that the city hasn’t yet bothered to extend its parking program here.

I reminded him that he doesn’t own a car, doesn’t like public transit and is too drunk most of the time to ride a bicycle or one of those sneaky little electric scooters.

“There ain’t no room for bikes in this city,” he said. “The drivers would run me off the road.”

He has a point. There are bike lanes here and there, but parked cars line South Philly streets, many of which have room for only one traffic lane. If there are no legal parking spaces the drivers park at street corners or on the sidewalks. But most pedestrians in South Philly and elsewhere seem unruffled by the fact that noisy, polluting cars take up almost all of their outdoor living space. Drivers are even more oblivious to this reality, of course. My hunch is that most of them could get used to seeing corpses swinging from the light fixtures on telephone poles so long as the corpses didn’t hang low enough to block the roads.

“You’re wrong, Odd Man,” Swamp Rabbit said. “They would drive around the corpses, or just knock them out of the way.”