I hate stories that start out like that. Read this one about New York. This guy took a job as a parking judge so he could learn all the ins and outs and after six months wrote a book on how to beat your parking tickets.
Most of the issues are administrative errors (data entry, mistakes on VIN numbers, etc) that cause the ticket not to be valid. According to this guy, even if you are guilty as sin, you should fight the ticket.
So let’s see — My vin number is about 20 numbers long, a combination of letters and numbers. The cop inverts one of those numbers. Everything else is correct, my car’s license number, description, he even has a picture of me parked in front of a fire hydrant. Not to worry. According to this guy the ticket should be thrown out.
This is patently absurd. People are human. Errors happen. However that doesn’t absolve the scofflaw from his crime. He blocked a fire hydrant, or stole money from the city by not paying at the meter. We are just forget it because an enforcement officer reversed a letter, or took a "0" to be a "O".
This is absurd. You break the law, you pay the price. And you should own up to it. Is there no morality left?
JVH
4 Responses
Well,
check out what they do in the UK.
http://www.streetmanagement.co.uk
Seems to be pretty good business
My comment reflects mostly on a recent New York Times article on the terrible parking situation in San Francisco. What that nearly accurate article failed to mention is the fact that the City of SF seems bent on a rampage to make certain every visitor, citizen and rebel receives a parking ticket and maybe a towing or two. I lived there for nearly a year and my employees told me when I first mentioned how easy SF was compared to New York City when it came to parking and traffic. They said,”…it’s not a matter of if, but WHEN…in San Francisco, parking tickets are simply a cost of doing business…” This comment rang loudly through my brain as I found myself in the middle of a torrential downpour and no umbrella, searching futilely for my car, which I’d parked on the street. As I was to find out later–my employee’s comment this time was, “..you got TOWED, man…”. My blue suit was soaked to oblivion. A caring soul on the street let me walk under umbrella while she walked in the general direction of the place I thought I’d left my car. Shivering pitifully, my worker rescued me from the street as he then led me through the ungraceful and expensive process of retrieving my car.
My point is: while I don’t condone violence against City employees doing their job. I understand the bitch here in this situation. While there, I received more than 10 tickets in 3 months, the last given on the day I left the Bay for my return to New York. They got me in every imaginable situation, one so bizarre the person receiving my complaint call had to look up the rules in a book. Apparently, some of the signs are bewilderingly complex even to those who enforce the rules.
Please don’t kill over parking, but SF should take a good hard look at the problem and perhaps find a better way to make that $40M annually besides hiring an army of tow trucks to swoop down over the downtown street parking at precisely 3pm on weekday afternoons!
Robert
I was told there is a letter that you can print off the internet to beat NY parking tickets to send in with parking tickets to try to beat them. I have an IT company in Manhattan and some of my workers are getting 3 tickets a week even though we have commercial plates. If the letter exists where can I find it.
You have a rather black and white view of this it seems. There’s no gray area in your reasoning. Sometimes cops, yes the mighty cops, are wrong. Not just mistaken, but wrong. I’m about to go fight a parking ticket that says I parked in front of a hydrant but I never did. I didn’t know about the ticket for four months because where ever my copy of the ticket ended up was not on my car. I got a letter four months later telling me I owed the city money. I requested a court date at that time and now, a year and four months later I’ve just gotten a court date. What I’m finding out today is that the longer the ticket goes unpaid the more it cost. So, not all tickets a right, I’m not paying for the mishandling of this situation just because I’m “supposed” to.