Problem: In New York City, and many other locales with pay and display equipment, the parker parks, goes to the P and D, gets his ticket, returns to his car to find a citation on the windshield. This happens, it appears, a lot in the Big Apple and a councilman wants to do something about it.
If a driver shows up within five minutes of the ticket being written, with a valid P and D receipt, that was time and date stamped between five minutes before and five minutes after the time of the citation, the officer can void the ticket.
That makes absolute sense. First, if the receipt so time stamped exists, obviously the person was down the block getting it. It is extremely doubtful that they are watching, and when they see the officer, they ran down the block and get the receipt. Second the PR generated due to an officer voiding a citation, and court time unused, will make a great difference to parking, in New York and elsewhere.
JVH
2 Responses
Couple of thoughts….unless the city has spaced their P & D machines much too far apart (which sometimes happen when they try to install technology on a shoestring budget), this sounds like a clear case of law enforcement targeting this opportunity. You’d have to have a ticket partially written before the person left their car in order to have it done and put on the car before they returned. Of course, this could also be partly attributed to poor signage explaining how to properly use the P & D. Alternately, it could truly be parkers claiming foul when they’ve really gone in to a store, shopped for 10 minutes thinking they’d beat the meter maids, and then returned to their car to find a ticket.
This happens in our 5-story parking deck in a Chicago suburb. A commuter drives into the deck to park. The Parking Officer enters the deck shortly afterwards. The Officer drives to the pay stations to obtain a “paid” report at the same time the commuter finds a parking space and walks down to the lobby to pay for their space at the pay stations. The Officer has already obtained the “paid” report, so the commuters car shows up as not being paid for and the Officer issues a ticket to that vehicle. If the commuter can produce a paid receipt time stamped within the same time frame the officer issued the ticket, it gets voided.
But I can’t imagine a parker ever lying about not paying! What is this world coming to?!?! (rolling eyes)…