Where not to park in Cambridge

If you need to be in Harvard, you can do the same thing on the Somerville border off Kirkland/Washington St - I used to live in Somerville and do that whenever it was too icy/snowy to safely bike.

Also, I believe you can safely ignore HUPD parking tickets until you get ~20 of them, or if you want to register your car with Harvard for some reason.

Non-gated MIT parking lots are freely available after 5PM on weekdays and all day on weekends and MIT holidays.

Well, over the river in Brookline they're issuing around 32,000 tickets every quarter[1], but have around half the population. Once you account for that it's still a little less than Cambridge, but then you would also expect Cambridge to issue more tickets - being a tourist destination there is more parking pressure, and more people unfamiliar with the area.

[1]: http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/brookline/2014/01/brookl...

Cambridge -> LA transplant here. (Westside) LA seems much worse - the overall number of tickets might be roughly similar, but each one is $65-80 here.