Madeleine Blais shares advice from Ann Banks in her Boston Globe OP-ED piece, What to tell my journalism grads:
"'The key to finding a parking spot is to drive to exactly where you want to be and only then to start looking for a place to park. Your passengers will probably try to undermine your confidence in this plan by urging you to take the first place you come across - claiming that 'we aren't going to do better than that.' Ignore them. You need to demonstrate to the Parking Gods that you expect to be lucky. In parking, as in life, start by going after exactly what you want. Because you never know.'"