BOSTON -- Three days after a snowstorm that dumped over a foot of snow on Boston, the city told car owners that they can no longer save shoveled parking spaces.

NewsCenter 5's Pam Cross reported that residents of South Boston are fiercely protective of their parking spaces after snowstorms. In a city where parking is already at a premium, residents use whatever they have available to claim the spaces they have cleared out.

"If you're shoveling snow for four or five hours, it is your spot for a while. You know what I mean?" South Boston resident Claire Miller said.

On block after block in Boston, laundry baskets, lawn furniture, Christmas decorations and recycling bins sit in empty parking spaces awaiting the motorist's return.

"When you want to furnish your cottage down the Cape, just drive around here in the winter," South Boston's Bob Cahill said.

Cahill said staking a claim to a parking space is silly.

"A chair can't keep the space forever," Cahill said.

But Cahill has the mayor's vote and on Wednesday, city trucks were deployed to collect the space holders.

"I have sympathy for those individuals who shoveled out -- I shoveled my car out also. But that is the rule and you have to live by it," Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said.

"It's just tradition, I guess, here in Boston. We have lived like that for a long time, so it works. It works in our neighborhood," South Boston's Kyle McManus said.