My good Lord – what next? A company is starting up in Philadelphia which, for a price, will monitor the parking tickets issued in the city and automatically pay them for you. Read all about it here.
I don’t know where to begin – I thought that the whole idea of a parking ticket was to at least slightly inconvenience the driver so next time they will follow the rules.
If they buy this “insurance” against parking tickets, they are essentially prepaying up to 15 parking tickets a year. Hell – why have parking regulations at all. Just buy this service and park anywhere, anytime you want and your tickets will be paid automatically. If a person signs up for this service, there is no reason why they should not become a scofflaw. Don’t they need, at a minimum, to use up their premium?
The company bills this as a “convenience” but what it really is, it seem to me, is a way for wealthy people to run roughshod over the parking rules in a city. Do people really get so many tickets that they need a service to “handle” the processing of them? And are they so lazy that they can’t do it themselves? Sheesh.
This is so much nonsense. Let’s carry it a tad further. (The company is going to offer to pay red light tickets in the future – why not sign up for that servie and just blast right through that red light – you have 3 goes paid for already.) How about Paying someone to go to jail for you. Rob a bank, get caught, and our company will provide someone to stand in at the trial and then when you are “up the river”.
JVH
2 Responses
There is nothing new in this world.
A guy started this idea in Mumbai many years ago but for trains not parking. He set up a “club” and paying members of the club never paid for a train ticket again. On the rare occasions that they got caught travelling without a ticket the club paid the fine. He got rich the railway got ripped off.
We got something similar in the UK when we introduced booting. Companies sprang up where, if you got booted they sent their guy to collect the ticket and pay the fine. The Police attitude was “we don’t care if we boot you it costs a $100, use these guys and it costs you $200 and if you dont shift the car quickly enough when we release it we will drive round the block, come back and boot it again”. They disappeared.
Social commentary aside,this seems like a pretty thin margin for the company or they are taking the position that you will likely not receive many parking tickets in Philadelphia. Meter tickets are $36 and 5 tickets covered under the “basic” plan assuming they are all for meters is $180. The “basic” plan is $99.99 and $9.99 per month, offset by a $10 Meter Card. If you get 5 or more meter tickets per year this is a no-brainer as you are basically paying for the service and the peace of mind that your tickets will never go into a penalty phase. Throw in a couple of higher dollar violations into the first five and you’re ahead of the game.
From a commercial business perspective, if you own a fleet of vehicles that rack up parking tickets and penalties, not to mention loss of man hours when a vehicle gets towed or booted, it’s a simple cost/benefit analysis. Don’t forget that you can probably write off the service as a business expense which is something you can’t do with parking tickets.
All in all, capitalism at its best (or worst if you initials are JVH).